Tyari Drew a Map of the One Mountain No One Can Map
A Solari acolyte spent her last nights drafting a route up Mount Targon, a mountain Riot’s region art says no reliable path has ever been mapped on, where one climb takes months and another a day.
Tyari, a Solari acolyte at the head of her class, was a month from joining the Solari infantry when she chose to climb Mount Targon instead. Mount Targon is the tallest mountain in Runeterra, the world Riot’s games share, and the Solari are the sun-worshipping order that rules it. In The Face in Her Stars, the Riot short story that follows her to the foot of the mountain, she prepares the way a good soldier would, spending the nights before the farewell ceremony drafting and annotating a map.
The story is honest about what that map is worth.
There had been those who ventured up and came back to tell the tale, but never beyond a certain point, and even then, it was said that the mountainscape became labyrinthine, unchartable for the ways that it shifted and moved.
Riot’s own region gallery for Targon says it with no hedge at all.
Leaving the bonds of Runeterra far behind, some climbers say Mount Targon seems to expand and contract beneath them, as if the rock itself were alive. This has always made it impossible to map any reliable path to the summit
From the Targon region gallery Journey Up the Mountain
The same gallery entry ends on the line this piece is about: “each climb is different, with some taking many months, and others apparently only a single day.” Every other road in Runeterra has a length. This one takes months for one climber and a day for another, which puts the length of the road in the climber rather than the rock. So what sets it, and why has nobody on a mountain this thoroughly built ever made a way around it?
Below the Clouds, the Rakkor Built Every Kind of Road
Gates, carved stairs, pulley lines and an ibex that carries climbers make the lower mountain the best-served climb in Runeterra, right up to a threshold where the priests sprinkle soil on the climbers’ heads.
Tyari’s map is not naive, because the lower mountain is built for travel. The Rakkor, the tribes who live on the mountain’s slopes, migrate across it with the seasons, and they have marked and cut the way.
The oldest paths through the mountains are marked by ancient gateways of glittering metal, the largest of which have come to mark the end of each phase of the Rakkor’s migration.
From the Targon region gallery The Vaulted Road
Tethered pulley systems are used to transport essential belongings up and down the steep slopes, while heavier tools and equipment are stored in shelters around the mountain, and repaired or remade as needed.
From the Targon region gallery The Pilgrim’s Life
Legends of Runeterra, Riot’s card game, draws the rest of the ladder as landmark cards. Spiral Stairs is narrated by a tour guide named Chip: “Here's da first stop on da tour! I call this da leg wobbler because WOWEE are dere a lot steps!” Startipped Peak, a lookout on the early climb, promises that “as the climb steepens, so do its rewards.” Star Spring is a healing pool “high on the crystal mountain,” and above all of them sits Targon’s Peak.
There is even something to ride. The Crystal Ibex, a crystal-horned mountain beast, carries two climbers on its back through a snowstorm in its art while one of them reaches down to haul up a third. The card’s verb for how you get that ride is befriend.
Those seeking to scale Targon would do well to befriend the local fauna. No creature is more familiar with Targon's perilous gauntlet, and none can travel more swiftly across its icy terrain.
Flavor text of Crystal Ibex
Then the road ends in a ceremony. The Generous Gemcrafter, a veiled gem-giver at the start of the climb, hands out crystal prayer beads and “asks nothing from them in return, for the price will be paid on the Mountain.” Tyari’s farewell takes place “at the foot of the ancient stone stairs leading up to the massive threshold,” and the priest treats the climbers as already buried.
As no one would be able to claim our bodies or bury us should we fail, the priest sprinkled soil over our heads, a final farewell.
This day marks the moment when the fate of their souls is placed into the hands of Targon. Most will likely never be seen again.
From the Targon region gallery The Farewell
“Each went alone, taking a different path,” Tyari says of the climbers who step through ahead of her. The Rakkor build right up to the threshold and then say goodbye to everyone who crosses it, which is the first clue that what lies past the gate is not a distance problem.
Above the Gate, the Rock Moves and the Dead Become Part of It
Canon’s own cards say Targon’s rock and landmarks shift, nobody is rescued from below, and the dead meld into the stone; Atreus climbed with his sworn brother Pylas, who died at the summit.
A road needs ground that stays put, and Targon’s does not. The Legends of Runeterra spell Divergent Paths sums the mountain up: “Targon is a capricious place, where the unbreakable is broken, and the broken made whole.” Even its landmarks walk. Stonebreaker records that “the great colossi of Targon awaken from their slumber and trek to new grounds atop the great mountain.” 
Pantheon, a Rakkor warrior who made the climb, puts it in one of his recorded League lines: “The mountain before me is not always high. Heh, it is not always a mountain.”
Nobody comes up after you, either. Riot’s region art says climbers start in groups because “there is no hope of rescue from below,” and it says what happens to the ones who stop.
The bodies of the dead do not tend to decay at such heights, but seem to gradually meld with the rock, becoming twisted into the circular patterns and ridges of the mountain.
From the Targon region gallery Patterns of the Dead
Pantheon was born Atreus, and he climbed in exactly the kind of group the gallery recommends, with Pylas, the training-ring rival who became his sworn brother. It did not bring them both home. His biography: “Like so many before them, they underestimated how arduous the ascent would be, with Pylas shivering his last upon finally reaching the summit.”
So the upper mountain cannot hold a road, because the rock will not hold still, and it cannot hold a rescue, because the dead become the rock. Those are reasons to lose the map. They do not explain why the same climb takes one person months and another a day.
The Climb Lasts as Long as the Judgment Does
Riot’s region art says the climb tests character, not lungs: Taric’s arrival is timed by his visions, Diana and Leona climbed the same night and felt opposite clocks, and a crystal Arbiter judges the climber’s spirit at the top.
The region gallery names the real danger.
However, the most dangerous thing about Mount Targon is not the incredible altitude, but the way in which it challenges the very character of each climber. The Rakkor regard the ascent as a trial of an aspirant’s spirit, as the inevitable solitude becomes unendurable and they suffer maddening, distracting visions of other times, places, and personal regrets.
From the Targon region gallery Otherworldly Perils
Taric got those visions by name. He is the Demacian soldier sentenced to the climb under the Crown of Stone, a sentence from Demacia’s most ancient traditions, after his comrades died while he was away from his post. Near the top he watched the Alabaster Library burn and saw his friend Garen’s body on a gibbet, and his biography times his arrival by the visions, not by the distance: “When the visions finally faded, Taric found himself at the very pinnacle of the mountain, and he was not alone.”
Two climbers on the same night show what that does to time. 
Diana, a Solari-raised orphan who kept asking what the order was hiding, slipped out of the temple to climb. Her biography: “The climb tested her in every way imaginable, and time seemed to stand still as she scaled the peak.” 
Leona, the most devout of their fellow acolytes and Diana’s closest friend, saw her go and followed the same night. Leona reached the top “after what seemed an eternity,” in hers, and found Diana engulfed in a column of silver light. One felt time stop and the other felt an eternity, yet Leona arrived while Diana was still inside the light.
Taric has a League line for it: “The mountain's question is unique for each of us.” At the end of the question there is a judge, the Arbiter of the Peak, the crystal guardian Legends of Runeterra stands at the summit. The landmark card Targon's Peak says what it weighs: “Its trials strip all mortal concerns, and lays bare the essence of the climber's soul. It is on this that they are judged, for the guardian is the great arbiter.”
The Arbiter is the mountain's final test, for only the guardian sees beyond the climber's deeds, and into their spirit.
Flavor text of Arbiter of the Peak
In the card game, Tyari gets there.
Tyari meets the Arbiter of the Peak, in Legends of Runeterra
Tyari: “Finally reached the peak!”
Arbiter of the Peak: “I have been expecting you, brave traveler.”
The same meeting, second exchange
Tyari: “Please Keeper, look into my heart.”
Arbiter of the Peak: “Come, my judgement will determine your fate.”
Recorded Legends of Runeterra lines, quoted as stored on RuneGrove. Tap a line to hear it.
That is the answer to her map. On Targon the map stops where the judgment starts, and the judgment runs as long as the climber needs judging. 
Soraka, the Starchild, a celestial being who took a body of flesh and keeps a yurt partway up the peak, can see the verdict coming before the summit. In Halfway Between the Stars and Earth she heals a frostbitten Rakkor girl on the approach and talks her out of the climb: “You have not truly chosen the mountain. And Targon will not choose you. You would walk to your death.”
On Targon the map stops where the judgment starts, and the judgment runs as long as the climber needs judging.
What Waits at the Top Needs a Climber to Ride Down In
The Aspects cannot cross into Runeterra unaided, so the summit runs both ways: a climber goes up and an Aspect may come down inside them, as War did in Atreus; Tyari’s Traveler says the journey did not end at the summit.
The judge has a reason to care who gets up. Beyond the peak lies the Celestial Realm, the cosmic realm that is home to the Aspects, the star-beings Targon’s champions carry. Each Aspect is the embodiment of one idea, such as War, the Sun or the Moon. Our encyclopedia records what the Rakkor believe about them.
The Rakkor hold that the Aspects are not gods. When the first Rakkor climbed the Great Mountain, they found otherworldly beings waiting at the summit, powers that had descended from the firmament of the celestial realm yet could not cross into Runeterra unaided, and who would bargain dearly for mortal vessels.
From our Celestial Realm entry
Our encyclopedia entry on the Aspects states the mechanism plainly: “Rather than walk the world themselves, they take mortal vessels: a climber who reaches the summit and proves worthy may be chosen and merged with the Aspect.” The region art frames it as a descent.
Indeed, once every few generations, one of these Aspects may descend from the mountain within the body of a climber they have deemed worthy.
From the Targon region gallery Once in a Lifetime
Accounts differ on how often. That gallery says once every few generations; our entry for Targon Prime, the city of gold and silver where the Aspects live, says “roughly once in a generation.” Either way, our read is that the summit is a crossing with traffic in both directions. A climber walks up, and the climber is the only road an Aspect has down.
Atreus is the proof that the traffic does not always go the climber’s way. He reached the top as the skies opened, and then:
But it was not a man who returned to the Rakkor afterward, spear and shield gleaming with celestial might. It was the Aspect of War itself, the Pantheon. Judging Atreus unworthy, a warrior who had known only defeat, it had taken control of his body to pursue its own ends
From Pantheon’s biography
Atreus climbed up, and the Aspect of War, the star-being of battle whose constellation he was named for, rode down in his body. His Legends of Runeterra card, Pantheon, calls him the man “who had his freedoms stripped from him by the very Aspects he revered,” and our Aspect Channeling entry, on the magic of hosting an Aspect, warns that “the relationship between Aspect and host is often parasitic.” He only won his body back after Aatrox, one of the Darkin, which his biography calls “living weapons created in a bygone age,” killed the Aspect inside him. The shield and spear he still carries run now on his will alone.
Tyari’s road goes the other direction: in the card game it runs past the summit into the stars. In her story she looks at a constellation, sees her own face in it, and silently names the woman there “the Traveler.” Legends of Runeterra makes both of them cards, Tyari the Traveler and a celestial card named The Traveler, and lets them meet. The card game never states that the star is Tyari grown, so that part is our reading, but one of the star’s lines to her is “My humble beginnings.”
Tyari meets The Traveler, in Legends of Runeterra
Tyari: “My journey begins here and ends at the top.”
The Traveler: “I thought my journey would end when I reached the summit.”
The same meeting
Tyari: “I'll become who I was always meant to be.”
The Traveler: “You've always been that person.”
Recorded Legends of Runeterra lines, quoted as stored on RuneGrove. Tap a line to hear it.
“We were always one and the same--we were separated only by the mountain, the journey, and a sea of stars.”
Flavor text of The Traveler
The Only Shortcuts Up Targon Open From the Sky
Zoe reached the apex through a portal her Aspect opened, a myth card guards the sky over the peaks, and Riot’s Targon cinematic ends with two fugitives walking a stair of light off a cliff at the eclipse.
One host never climbed. 
Zoe was a bored Rakkor girl running from her teachers when the Aspect of Twilight, the star-being she now carries, noticed her, and her biography is blunt that she did not “overcome the existential trial of climbing Mount Targon.” The Aspect “opened a shimmering portal to the apex of Mount Targon, offering the girl a chance to see the universe,” and she dived through. Canon calls it “unheard of in all the myths and legends of Targon.”
Her clock broke afterwards: “While for Zoe barely a year had passed, she returned home after what had apparently been many centuries in Runeterra.” Her biography puts that gap down to where she went next, dimensions at the very edge of mortal comprehension, so the portal did not cost it. It fits what our Mount Targon Summit entry says about the top: “time itself behaves strangely, bending in ways unknown to the world below.”
Nor does anyone fly over the test. A Legends of Runeterra myth card, The Destroyer, tells of a guard in the sky above the peaks: “To safeguard the spaces between land and sky, a horned guardian was placed in the stars over the mountains. Sturdy and swift, it traverses the night sky in search of intruders.” Canon never aims that guard at climbers, so reading it as Targon’s answer to anyone going over the mountain instead of up it is ours.
Riot’s own Targon cinematic is named for the Rakkor’s built road and ends on one nobody built. Tales of Runeterra: Targon, subtitled The Vaulted Road, opens on a shout that the prisoner is gone and a pair of fugitives running through one of the metal gates. Their pursuers call the man a traitor; someone calls the woman Lyra. One of them has seen the way out in “a vision in the pools”: “When the moon blocks the sun, our path to freedom will be illuminated at Dragon's Roost.”
At the cliff, under the eclipse, there is nothing past the edge. “There's no path. What do we do?” The answer is “Have faith.” Then a stair of light rises out of the clouds and the two walk up it into the stars, while Diana and Leona are left on the cliffs below. It is the same shape as Zoe’s portal, and it is what the frostbitten girl told Soraka she meant to do: “I’ll walk off the final peak and right into the sky, just like the old stories.”
So the length of the road up Targon is set by what waits at the end of it. The Rakkor built everything below the threshold because everything below it is only distance. Everything above it is a judgment, and a judgment can be passed, failed, or, in the cases canon records, waived from the sky. It cannot be mapped, ridden or flown over, which is why Tyari’s map was always going to run out, and why her star says the journey kept going past the summit anyway.
What This Means for the Riot MMO
Nothing is announced; canon supports easy travel up to the threshold, then an on-foot climb with no mount, no flight, no fixed route and no rescue, whose length is set by its trial.
Nothing here is announced, and Riot has shown no zone, mount or travel system from its MMO. What Targon’s canon hands it is a traversal rule most zones never need: a mountain where getting there faster would break the place.
- Below the clouds, easy. The Vaulted Road gates make natural waypoints, the pulley lines carry your gear, and the Crystal Ibex is a ride you befriend on the slopes rather than buy.
- Above them, on foot. No mount, no flying and no fixed route past the threshold. The upper climb reshuffles on every attempt, so the map you drew stops matching, as Tyari’s did.
- Length set by the trial. The climb ends when its test ends, not after a set distance. One player is up in an evening, another needs weeks, and both are right.
- No rescue from below. A group can start together, as Atreus and Pylas did, but a fall is not a corpse run. The farewell ceremony is the last safe place you leave.
- The top changes who descends. Every biography gives the way down one clause, because the person coming down is someone else. Build the descent as a different character walking home.
Most MMOs make a world feel big with distance: more yards, longer rides. Targon offers a different lever, a peak the whole region lives under that no route reaches, where how long the climb took says something about the climber.
Our read. The Riot MMO should give Targon the best roads in the game right up to the threshold, and none past it. A flight point on the summit would be the one travel feature canon rules out, because the only shortcuts it allows up that mountain are the ones the sky hands down.
Fair Trial or Cruel Toll?
Canon says the climb to Mount Targon’s summit judges each climber’s soul, yet Pylas died at the top and the Aspect of War judged Atreus unworthy and took his body. Is the climb a fair trial or a cruel toll?
Read Next
None of this is confirmed. Sources: the short stories The Face in Her Stars and Halfway Between the Stars and Earth; the biographies of Pantheon, Taric, Diana, Leona and Zoe; the Targon region galleries; our Mount Targon Summit, Celestial Realm, Targon Prime, Aspect, Aspect Channeling and Pantheon’s Shield and Spear entries; Legends of Runeterra cards, their flavor text and recorded lines; League of Legends voice lines; and Riot’s Tales of Runeterra: Targon cinematic, all Riot canon. The link between Tyari and The Traveler, and between The Destroyer and the climb, is our reading. A RuneGrove lore read.
