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

polygon.com:

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.

The 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. Each Void monster has a ravenous need to consume, evolve, and destroy.

The lore explains that the Void used to be a place of pure quiet and nothingness, and when Runeterra came into being, the noise of its existence became unbearable to the Watchers that slept within the Void. The Watchers are basically what would happen if the Lovecraftian pantheon had to live in a crowded apartment building surrounded by loud neighbors who are constantly hammering, screaming, or throwing parties.

The Void has broken through into the world of League of Legends in two major ways. The first is in the wastelands of Icathia. Icathia was once a thriving nation of its own, but its leaders decided to stand up to the dominant empire of Shurima. 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