League of Legends’ new champion Bel’Veth comes with an ocean of lore

The next League of Legends champion, Bel’Veth, is one of the most unusual champions on the game’s enormous roster. She’s an onion of body horror tropes, wrapping an uncanny-valley woman disguise around a manta ray-shaped monster, and she wants nothing more than to eat the world and use it as fuel for a new, nightmarish empire. While fans only met Bel’Veth recently, Riot Games has been seeding the plot for her arrival for some time now.

Learn to evolve and adapt

Void in League of Legends is an extradimensional force; it’s a realm of nightmare made manifest. Champions like Cho’Gath, Kha’Zix, and Vel’Koz all come from the Void, and they serve as scouts in the world of Runeterra. Every Void monster is hungry for destruction, evolution, and food.

Legend has it that Runeterra used to be an area of quiet and nothingness. However, when Runeterra became a reality, Runeterra’s noise made life unbearable for the Void-dwellers. These Watchers would be what happens if Lovecraftian Pantheon lived in an overcrowded apartment with noisy neighbors shouting and hammering.

Riot Games

The Void has entered the world of League of LegendsIn two ways. First, in Icathia’s wastelands. Icathia used to be a flourishing nation. But its leaders refused to bow to Shurima’s dominant empire. In order to fight back against Shurima’s god warriors, they dug up slumbering Voidborn. The short story “Where Icathia Once Stood” is a terrifying look at how that went, but the tl;dr is that it was a Terrible idea.

All of this sets the stage for Bel’Veth, Empress of the Void, and her hideous birth into reality. Ages later, the Void has started to spread out of Icathia and deep into Shurima, continuing to devour and destroy — including the port city of Belveth. “Bel’Veth is made from the DNA of all the lifeforms that were consumed by the Void in the city of Belveth,” says Ryan Mireles, the lead producer of gameplay for League of Legends An interview with Polygon via Email

“That included a ton of people as well as marine life found in the harbor (it was a harbor town.) That’s why Bel’Veth is part human, but also has a bunch of different marine lifeforms in her design like manta rays and vampire squids. We wanted her minions to also be aquatic, hence the remora,” adds Mireles.

And because the Void is so heavily based on evolution, and Bel’Veth has eaten so many people, she’s taken on the quality of self-preservation. Bel’Veth doesn’t want the Watchers to win and establish a nothingness of perfect silence — she wants to eat our world and use it for a new Void realm.

Null and Void

It sets the scene for civil war. Due to an agreement they struck with Lissandra the Ice Witch, the Watchers also have a foothold on the frozen Freljord in north. Lissandra, along with her sisters Avarosa (and Serylda) were given incredible powers by the Watchers. From this agreement came the Freljordian Iceborn Warriors and the powerful True Ice. Lissandra only realized how dangerous the Watchers really were when her sisters rebelled against the bargain, demanding their freedom, and she was forced to seal the Watchers’ incursion in a blanket of ice.

That was in “a time long forgotten,” and Lissandra has spent generations preparing for the Watchers’ return. The story “The Eye in the Abyss” is a haunting tale of Lissandra’s warriors scouting out the Watchers’ resting place — and, of course, things go hideously wrong. Bel’Veth is sympathetic to this; she’s anti-Watcher and so she is a natural ally to Lissandra, even if she’s an enemy to literally everyone else, also including Lissandra.

Lissandra is the Freljord’s fortress and ensures that the Void remains peaceful and happy. The opposite happens in Icathia. The prophet Malzahar has been actively feeding the Void; it’s consumed entire villages, and the more it eats, the more it spreads. Kai’Sa, Daughter of the Void, is one such victim. She’s the only survivor of her village due to using a Voidborn as makeshift armor, which grew to become a biological suit fused to her skin.

Kai’Sa meets Taliyah, a Shuriman leader trying to find safe harbor for her people from the Void, in the short story “Hollowspun.” Kai’Sa and Taliyah end up discovering how far the Void has spread, and their battle against the monster queen Rek’Sai is one part of “The Call,” the game’s most recent cinematic, along with battles in the Freljord and on Mount Targon. Interestingly enough, we also see Rek’Sai and her brood resisting Bel’Veth. Rek’Sai is the ultimate momma bear, and she doesn’t want the Empress anywhere near her babies.

After the battle in “The Call,” Kai’Sa escapes Rek’Sai through the void tunnels under the desert. The Void Empress is found in Shurima’s southernmost part, and she eventually meets her in the Lavender Sea Void realm. The Lavender Sea, and Bel’Veth herself, were heralded by the prophet Malzahar. Malzahar found a Void Pocket and began feeding it aggressively, with horrendous results. As the story “Feast of the Prophet” puts it: “Throughout the day, these cultists throw livestock into the hole. They toss each other in the hole. Sometimes they throw themselves into the hole.”

That hole leads to the Lavender Sea, the realm of Bel’Veth, and Kai’Sa stumbles upon its horror. The below cinematic is followed by the story “Pinwheel,” in which Bel’Veth recruits Kai’Sa in her plan to stop the Watchers — the Empress is the lesser of two evils, but she’s still definitely pretty evil.

The original goal for Bel’Veth was to be more of a monstrous female champion, something like Renekton, Nasus, or Rengar, but female,” says Mireles, noting that the closest thing the roster has to a monstrous female humanoid is Lamb, one half of Kindred. “Over development though she pushed further and further into the creature camp, until we noted that the Void had a lot of unrelateable monsters.”

What would you do? RelatedWhat does a Void Monster, which could interact with champions or humans, look like? The team went for an anglerfish approach; she’s able to lure in prey or appear as a diplomat, but she’s still very clearly It is notA person. She’s more like a horde of chittering horrors stacked on top of each other in a trenchcoat and pretending to be a person. “Bel’Veth doesn’t have real human legs. She has 2 kind-of-human-leg-like tentacles hanging from her body. It’s actually creepy AF if you ever see them,” says Mireles. “In the end, we felt that the two forms would be a really interesting addition to our growing roster.”

Bel’Veth is the sort of big bad who could create an event like the Sentinels of Light, and she heralds a lot of change for the League of Legends story. Just don’t trust her pleasant face — she Will turn you into a remora, and that’s if you’re lucky.