Which Champions Suffered Most in League Lore?

How We Ranked Them

Nine champions, ranked by what their own canon says they endured and for how long. Every step up is judged the same way: what it cost them, and how long it has gone on. The count runs from #9 up to #1, and every spot rests on a passage quoted from that champion's biography.

#9. Aphelios

Aphelios, the Weapon of the Faithful, is an assassin for the Lunari, the moon faith of Mount Targon, which the Solari, the sun faith that rules the mountain, treat as heretics. His twin sister Alune, a seer, was born with him during a rare lunar convergence, and the Lunari celebrated them as children of destiny.

Looking for his own path, Aphelios found noctum, a poisonous flower that blooms under water. Distilled, it "opened him to the night's power," and when he drank it, he "felt so much pain that it numbed him to everything else."

When a Solari army attacked the Lunari, Alune pushed their temple back into the spirit realm, the world beyond the physical one, with herself inside, to keep it safe. From there she could project her magic anywhere, as long as it found a focus, and the focus was the poison in her brother's veins.

From Aphelios - Biography

"Only apart could they be together," and together they became "the weapon the Lunari needed, bound by pain and sacrifice."

Aphelios opens the countdown because his pain has a purpose and he is not alone in it: Alune guides him and sees through his eyes.

#8. Amumu

Amumu, the Sad Mummy, is a lonely soul from ancient Shurima, the desert empire, who roams the world looking for a friend. Those who claim to have seen him describe a small figure covered in bandages the color of lichen. His biography admits that the stories about him have been told and retold so often that "it is impossible to separate truth from fiction."

The versions disagree on how it started. In one, thousands of people walked past him and "not one stopped to offer a helping hand." His sadness grew until he "eventually died of a broken heart," and death did not end it, because some swear he still wanders the desert looking for someone to restore his faith in humanity.

Other versions make him a young emperor of Shurima, cursed by a grieving grandmother or sealed in a tomb by his own slaves.

From Amumu - Biography

His touch kills and his affection ruins, so the one thing he searches for is the one thing he cannot have. On long winter nights, people say he can be heard weeping in the desert. Whatever he is looking for, "he has yet to find it."

Amumu ranks above Aphelios because Aphelios has his sister, while Amumu's curse is to be alone forever, with nobody to share it.

#7. Nautilus

Nautilus, the Titan of the Depths, was a salvage diver. He worked a graveyard of sunken ships south of the Blue Flame Isles, an island chain, and no diver could match him. He asked no special wages, only that the captain "toss a coin overboard as they set out, honoring and appeasing the vast ocean."

Then a new captain bought the ship to reach one wreck, "shrouded in darkness even on a fair day," and had Nautilus bolted into a giant iron suit. The crew had nothing to pay the tithe, and the captain laughed and said they would pay it when Nautilus came back up. Something in the depths started pulling him down. "It was not treasure his captain sought, but some slumbering, eldritch power."

He grabbed the anchor chain and hauled himself up, but just short of the surface the chain snapped:

From Nautilus - Biography

He woke on the ocean floor changed, the suit now a seamless shell bonded to his spirit, remembering only "the new captain's broken promise." When he reached Bilgewater, a port city, years had passed, and there was "no life to which he could return, no revenge he could take."

Amumu is still searching for a friend. Nautilus lost every memory but one and has nothing left to go home to, so he ranks higher.

#6. Warwick

Warwick, the Uncaged Wrath of Zaun, is a monster who hunts the gray alleys of Zaun, the undercity beneath Piltover, going after the criminals who terrorize the city's depths. He was once a gangster who "put down his blade and took up a new name to live a better life." He cannot recall how he fell into the hands of Singed, a chemist who experimented on him one cut at a time.

Singed installed a chemical chamber on his back and wired it into his nervous system. Whenever Warwick felt rage, hate or fear, the chamber drove "liquid fury" deeper into his veins.

From Warwick - Biography

When he tries to recall a single memory from his past, all he sees is blood, and blood is what he hunts: he is "driven mad by its scent." The only thing that gets through is a little girl screaming something that "sounded like a name."

Warwick ranks above Nautilus because Nautilus lost his past in one fall into the dark, while Warwick was forced to endure every cut, for "weeks on the slab," and the agony is what erased who he was.

#5. Senna

Senna, the Redeemer, spent her life hunted by the Black Mist, a cursed fog that pulls the souls out of the living.

As a child she watched wreckage from a distant Harrowing, one of the Mist's attacks on the living, wash up on her home island. The Mist inside it woke the moment it touched life. She and her village survived only because a Sentinel, one of the order that fights the Mist, stepped in, and after that the Mist was "still mysteriously drawn to Senna."

Years later she and her husband Lucian were searching for a cure for her curse when they ran into the sadistic wraith Thresh. Lucian was so close to answers that he refused to turn back:

From Senna - Biography

As the deathblow landed, she saw one chance. Having lived with the Mist all her life, she could ride it "into the darkness of Thresh's lantern" to see what was inside. Years later, when Lucian drove his pistol into the lantern, she escaped, "dead, but also alive."

Her torment did not start on a table, as Warwick's did. It started in childhood and followed her all the way into Thresh's lantern, so she ranks above him.

Riot's trailer Shadow's Embrace shows Lucian fighting Thresh over the lantern, and Senna coming back out of it.

#4. Yorick

Yorick, Shepherd of Souls, is the last survivor of a long-forgotten religious order, a monk who now has power over the dead.

He was tending the cemetery on the Blessed Isles, the islands that would become the Shadow Isles, when a pitch-black cloud rolled across the islands, "devouring everything in its path." Yorick tried to run, and it swallowed him. People, animals and even plants twisted into ghoulish mockeries of themselves as the Black Mist corrupted them. Then his brothers turned on the vials of healing water around their necks:

From Yorick - Biography

Among their fading screams, Yorick alone could hear voices in the mist. That cloud was the Black Mist, born in the Ruination, the catastrophe that cursed his home, and he never left. His only companions are "the rotting corpses and shrieking spirits that he gathers to him," and his goal is to free his home from the curse.

Yorick ranks above Senna because she died with a plan and came back, while he survived: he watched every brother lose his soul and has been alone among the dead for so long that his order is forgotten.

#3. Sion

Sion, the Undead Juggernaut, was a brutal Noxian warlord more than a century ago, the last of a proud warrior culture that had been part of Noxus since its founding.

He swore oaths to his ancestors to never take a backward step in battle and to die a proud warrior's death. He got that death, killing the Demacian king Jarvan the First as he fell. Half a century later, Boram Darkwill, the Grand General who then ruled Noxus, had his allies, "a mysterious cabal known as the Black Rose," raise him with forbidden magic and send him back to war. This time he was uncontrollable, "killing friend and foe without remorse," until soldiers deserted rather than fight beside him, and Darkwill ordered him put back in the ground.

Hundreds of warriors died before Sion was finally chained and dragged back to the Immortal Bastion, the fortress at the heart of the empire:

From Sion - Biography

When the tomb opened again, a general, Jericho Swain, had overthrown Darkwill, and he sent Sion in an iron cage to Hvardis, a city that had broken away from Noxian rule, as punishment for its rebellion.

Yorick kept his mind and his purpose. Sion lost the death he swore to, then his mind, then many years to a sealed tomb, so he ranks above Yorick.

#2. Kalista

Kalista, the Spear of Vengeance, was a proud general, niece to the king of an empire that none now recall. She once saved the king from an assassin, but the deflected blade was poisoned, and it cut the queen. Kalista sailed to Helia, the capital of the Blessed Isles, whose masters agreed to heal the queen with their Waters of Life, but when she returned, the queen was dead.

Kalista led the king, mad with grief, and his fleet to Helia, but its masters would not let him pass. "Death, they insisted, was final." The king flew into a rage and ordered Kalista to slay anyone who opposed them. Hecarim of the Iron Order had taken her place at the king's side:

From Kalista - Biography

Her warriors fought Hecarim's knights and lost, and Kalista died watching them fall, "swearing vengeance with her final breath." When she opened her eyes again, the whole of the Blessed Isles was full of spirits "trapped for all eternity in the nightmare of undeath."

In Riot's teaser The Pledge, a betrayed man offers his soul to her, and the answer is "Pledge accepted."

Kalista ranks above Sion because Sion's oath was broken by an empire, while she was speared in the back by the comrade she called on, and woke into an undeath with no end.

#1. Renekton

Renekton, the Butcher of the Sands, is a god-warrior of ancient Shurima, one of the immortals its Sun Disc raised, and he was born to fight. His pride never let an insult pass, and as a boy he brawled with much older children.

He and Nasus, the older brother who disapproved of his street-fighting, ended up fighting Xerath, the emperor's treacherous magus, who had turned himself into "a malevolent being of pure energy" that the two of them could not destroy. So Renekton wrestled Xerath into the Tomb of the Emperors beneath the city and told his brother to seal them both inside. Nasus did it reluctantly, "knowing there was no other way."

Sealing the tomb did not end the fight:

From Renekton - Biography

Piece by piece, his sanity cracked, and Xerath worked at the cracks until Renekton could no longer tell what was real from what was imagined. When greedy scavengers finally opened the tomb, he roared out into the desert, sniffing the air for his brother's scent.

Renekton is #1 because nobody else here endured for as long or lost as much to it. He chose the tomb to stop Xerath, spent uncounted centuries in the dark beside him, and came out believing the brother he did it for had betrayed him.

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