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Leona OriginalCentered
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Targon Crest icon

Biography

The Radiant Dawn

By Ian St. Martin

Biography[]

Among the Rakkor tribes that dwell upon Targon Crest icon Mount Targon, the sun is sacred, and none venerate it more than the Solari. Children are raised from birth to honor it, and even to shed blood for it, until its Aspect returns, heralding a grave threat they all must face.

Leona was one such child. She took to the Solari faith as naturally as breathing, finding solace and warmth within its rigid structure. This manifested through her rapid achievement of excellence, her peers envious of her capability, willpower, and devotion. None doubted she would one day become one of the Ra’Horak, the holy warriors of the Solari.

Though Leona flourished, she could not help but see her masters struggle with their most exasperating student, an orphan named Diana Diana. Her curiosity was welcomed at first, but soon the teachers began to perceive Diana’s questions as challenging the Solari ways. Leona watched Diana suffer punishment and isolation—but where others saw insolence, she saw a lost soul devoted to a search for meaning.

Leona found her purpose in the Solari teachings, and resolved to share it with Diana as even the most dutiful teachers forsook her. The two would debate late into the night, with Leona hoping to persuade Diana that everything she could ever want was there in the faith, waiting for her to accept it. Though she failed to win Diana over, Leona did find a friend.

One night, Diana confided a secret to Leona. She spoke of discovering a hidden alcove in the mountain, an ancient place where the walls were etched with depictions of strange symbols and forgotten societies. When Diana mentioned climbing the summit of Mount Targon to learn more, Leona urged her to stop. Seeking to protect her from the ire of the other Solari, Leona made Diana promise to abandon this search. Reluctantly, Diana agreed.

Time passed, and the two never spoke of Diana’s discovery again. Leona believed her friend had finally come to her senses.

Her belief was shattered late one night, when she glimpsed Diana slipping out of the temple. While her first instinct was to tell the elders, Leona thought instead of protecting her friend, wresting her back from the edge. Resolved, Leona set off after Diana…

To the summit of Mount Targon.

The ascent was a trial unlike any Leona had ever endured, straining every fiber of her being to its limit, and beyond. Her training, willpower, and concern for Diana was all that drove her on. The unblinking eyes of bodies frozen into the mountain's slopes watched her climb, their own journeys forever incomplete, but not even they could deter her.

After what seemed an eternity—and much to her own amazement—Leona reached the peak.

Exhausted, she beheld an uncanny landscape, and found Diana engulfed in a coruscating column of silver light. Leona saw her friend’s silhouette writhing in agony, the air rippling with her screams. Horrified, Leona rushed to her aid, when a golden radiance slashed down from the heavens to envelop her.

The sensation was indescribable, but rather than incinerating Leona, the illumination coursed into her, suffusing her with incredible power. She clung to her consciousness, fighting the current seeking to sear away her very being.

Ultimately, her indomitable will triumphed—and with that control came understanding.

With control came understanding. Leona was forever changed, imbued by the Aspect of the Sun. Destiny had selected her, and it was her duty to protect the Solari in the times to come.

It was then that Leona saw Diana, clad in gleaming silver war-plate, a strange reflection of the golden armor she discovered herself now wearing. Diana begged Leona to join her, to seek out answers the Solari could not offer. Leona demanded they return home, and present themselves for the priests’ judgment. Neither conceded, and they finally felt the weight of the weapons in their hands.

Their combat was swift, a blistering clash between sun and moon, ending with Diana’s crescent blade at Leona’s throat. But, rather than delivering the killing blow, Diana fled. Devastated, Leona descended Targon and hurried to her elders.

When she arrived, she found slaughter. Many Solari priests and their Ra’Horak guardians were dead, seemingly slain by Diana’s hand. The survivors were awed by the presence of two Aspects now in their midst, and Leona was committed to helping them navigate this new reality—the guiding light to her people, just as the sun had always been.

She has sworn to find Diana, to preserve the dominance of the Solari... but also to help her old friend control the Moon Aspect’s power before it destroys her.

Change log[]

The Radiant Dawn
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Leona Render
"If you would shine like a sun, first you must burn like one."

To live in the lands surrounding the towering peak of Mount Targon is to embrace a life of hardship. That many willingly do so is testament to the power of the human spirit to endure anything in search of meaning and higher purpose. As harsh as the rugged foothills of the mountain's base are, it is nothing compared to the hardships borne by those who dwell on the mountain itself.

Living high on Targon is fraught with danger. When the glittering mist wreathing the summit descends, it does not come alone. All manner of otherworldly things are left behind when it withdraws; radiant creatures that kill at random and muttering voices that whisper unspeakable secrets to drive mortals mad.

Eking a living from mountain plants and their precious herds, the Rakkor tribe dwells at the very limits of human endurance; honing their warrior skills to fight the war at the end of the world. Rakkor means Tribe of the Last Sun, and its people believe that many worlds have existed before this one, each of which has been destroyed by a great catastrophe. Its seers teach that when this sun is destroyed there will be no more, so its warriors must be ready to fight those who seek to extinguish its light. To the Rakkor, battle is an act of devotion, an offering to keep the sun's light shining. All members of the tribe are expected to fight and kill without mercy or hesitation, and Leona was no exception. She learned to fight as soon as she could walk, mastering sword and shield with ease. She was fascinated by the mists wreathing the summit and often wondered what might lie beyond them. That fascination did not stop her from fighting the ferocious beasts, inhuman entities and pallid, eyeless strangers that came down the mountain.

She fought and killed them as she had been taught until one day when young Leona encountered a golden-skinned boy with horns and bat-like wings wandering on the mountainside. He did not speak her language, but it was clear he was lost and frightened. His skin shimmered with soft light, and though everything she had been taught since birth told her to attack, Leona could not bring herself to murder someone so obviously helpless. Instead, she led the boy to a pathway leading to the summit, watching as he walked into a ray of sunlight and vanished.

When she returned to the Rakkor, she found herself accused of failing in her duty to the sun. A boy named Atreus Atreus had seen her leading a creature of the mountain to safety instead of killing it. Atreus had told his father what Leona had done and he in turn denounced her as a heretic for going against the beliefs of her people. Leona did not dispute this, and the laws of the Rakkor allowed only one sentence for such a transgression - trial by combat. Leona would face Atreus in the fighting pits beneath the noonday sun, and by its light would judgment be rendered. Leona and Atreus were evenly matched; her warrior skills were formidable, but Atreus had ever been single-minded in his pursuit of martial excellence. Leona took up her sword and shield, Atreus his long spear, and none who gathered around the pit could predict the battle's outcome.

Leona and Atreus fought beneath the blazing sun, and though both bled freely from dozens of wounds, neither could land a deathblow. As the sun dipped toward the horizon, an elder of the Solari marched into the Rakkor camp with three gold-armored warriors and called a halt to the duel. The Solari were adherents of a martial faith built around sun worship, whose unforgiving tenets dictated life around and upon Mount Targon. The elder had been led to the Rakkor by dreams and an ancient Solari prophecy that spoke of a warrior whose fire burned brighter than the sun, a daughter of Targon who would bring unity to the celestial realm. The elder believed Leona was that daughter and upon learning the nature of her transgression, his belief was only strengthened.

The tribal seers warned against interfering in the duel, but the elder was adamant; Leona must come with him and become one of the Solari, to be fully instructed in their beliefs. The Rakkor were fiercely independent, but even they paid heed to the holy decrees of the Solari. The warriors lifted Leona from the pit and bore her wounded body from the Rakkor toward her new life. The Solari temple was a towering citadel on the eastern slopes of Mount Targon, a glittering spire of gold-veined marble and polished granite. Here, Leona learned the ways of the sacred order – how they worshipped the sun as the source of all life and rejected all other forms of light as false. Its strictures were absolute and unyielding, but fueled by her belief in the elder's prophecy, Leona excelled in this disciplined environment, devouring her new faith's teachings as a parched man in a desert seizes upon fresh water. Leona trained every day with the warrior order of the Solari, the Ra-Horak - a Rakkor title which means Followers of the Horizon - honing her already fearsome skills with a blade into something sublime. In time, Leona rose to command the Ra-Horak, becoming known around Mount Targon as a just, devoted and, some might say, zealous servant of the Sun.

Her path changed forever when she was called to escort a young member of the Solari to the heart of the temple. The girl's hair was purest white and a shimmering rune glowed upon her forehead. Her name was Diana Diana, a troublemaker well known to Leona from the exasperated woes of the temple elders. Diana had gone missing months before, but now returned, clad in a suit of pale armor that glinted with strange silver light. Diana claimed to bring great news, revelations that would shake the Solari to its foundations, but which she would only reveal to the temple elders. Leona brought Diana in under armed guard, for her warrior instinct sensed something awry in the girl's demeanor. Presented to the elders, Diana spoke of the Lunari Lunari, an ancient and proscribed faith that venerated the moon, and how all the truths the Solari clung to were incomplete. She described a realm beyond the mountaintop, a place where the sun and moon were not enemies, where new truths could show them fresh ways to look at the world. Leona felt her anger build with every word Diana spoke, and when the elders rejected her words and named her a blasphemer, Leona knew it would be her blade that ended the heretic's life.

Leona saw Diana's incredulous fury at the elders' denial, but before she could react, the white-haired girl hurled hurled herself forward. Blinding light light exploded from Diana's outstretched hands, and orbs orbs of silver fire burned the elders to dust in the blink of an eye. White flames surged in a hurricane of cold lightning and blasted Leona from the chamber. When she regained consciousness, she found Diana gone and the Solari leaderless. As its remaining members struggled to come to terms with this attack on their most sacred space, Leona knew there was only one path open to her. She would hunt down and destroy the heretic Diana for the murder of the Solari elders.

Diana's trail was easy to find. The heretic's footsteps were like shimmering mercury to Leona's eyes, leading ever higher up the slopes of Mount Targon. Leona did not falter, climbing through a landscape that seemed strange and unfamiliar, as though she followed paths that had never existed until this moment. The sun and moon passed overhead in a blur, as if many days and nights passed with her every breath. She neither stopped to eat nor drink, letting fury sustain her beyond what should have been humanly possible.

Eventually Leona reached the top of the mountain, breathless, exhausted, starved and stripped of all thought save punishing Diana. There, sitting on a rock at the top of the mountain was the same golden-skinned boy whose life she had spared as a child. Behind him, the sky burned with blazing light, a borealis of impossible colors and the suggestion of a majestic city of gold and silver. In its fluted towers and glittering minarets, Leona saw how the Solari temple echoed its magnificence and fell to her knees in rapture.

The golden-skinned boy spoke to her in the old Rakkor tongue, telling her he had been waiting for her to follow him since that day, and that he hoped she wasn't too late. He held out his hand and offered to show her miracles and to know the minds of gods.

Leona had never turned from anything in her life. She took the boy's hand as he smiled and led her into the light. A column of searing illumination stabbed down from the heavens and engulfed Leona. She felt an awesome presence filling her limbs with terrifying power and forgotten knowledge from the earliest epochs of the world. Her armor and weapons burned to ash in the cosmic fire and were in turn reborn as ornate warplate, a shield shield of sunlight wrought in gold and a sword sword of chained dawnlight.

The warrior who came down the mountain looked the same as the one who had climbed it, but inside Leona was much changed. She still had her memories and thoughts, was still master of her own flesh, but a sliver of something vast and inhuman had chosen her to be its mortal vessel. It gifted her with incredible powers and awful knowledge that haunted her eyes and weighed heavily upon her soul; knowledge she could only ever share with one person.

Now, more than ever, Leona knew she had to find Diana.
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Leona Render old
On the upper slopes of Mount Targon, the warriors of Rakkor live and breathe only for war. However, Targon's peak is reserved for a special group of Rakkor who answer to a 'higher' calling. Members of this group, called the Solari Solari, retire their mantles of war, choosing instead to devote their lives to reverence of the sun.

According to legend, the Solari were formed by a warrior who could call call the raw might of the sun down upon his enemies in combat. He claimed Mount Targon's summit, the point on Valoran closest to the sun, for his solar devotion, a tradition which generations of Solari have preserved to this day.

Leona's parents were traditional Rakkor, both bred for the heat of battle. To them, Leona was a problem child. She was capable of fighting as fiercely as any other - including her childhood friend, Pantheon Pantheon - but she did not share their zeal for killing. She believed that the true worth of a soldier lay in her ability to defend and protect.

When it came time for her Rite of Kor, a ceremony in which two Rakkor teens battle to the death for the right to bear a relic-weapon, Leona refused to fight. For this, the Rakkor leaders ordered her execution, but when they tried to strike the fatal blow, sunlight burst forth, bathing Mount Targon in light.

As it faded, Leona stood unharmed and her executioners lay unconscious around her. The Solari immediately claimed Leona, demanding that her sentence be repealed. She donned the golden armor of the Solari and they bestowed upon her the sword sword and shield shield passed down from the ancient sun-warrior of legend.

The Solari helped Leona focus her abilities, so that she bring light to even the darkest of battles.
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Leona Render old
"The sun's rays reach all of Runeterra, so too must the image of its champion."

On the upper slopes of Mount Targon, the warriors of Rakkor live and breathe only for war. However, Targon's peak is reserved for a special group of Rakkor who answer to a 'higher' calling. Members of this group, called the Solari Solari, retire their mantles of war, choosing instead to devote their lives to reverence of the sun.

According to legend, the Solari were formed by a warrior who could call call the raw might of the sun down upon his enemies in combat. He claimed Mount Targon's summit, the point on Valoran closest to the sun, for his solar devotion, a tradition which generations of Solari have preserved to this day. Though they maintain their reverence, no other warrior possessed the gifts of the founder - until Leona.

Leona's parents were traditional Rakkor, both bred for the heat of battle. To them, Leona was a problem child. She was capable of fighting as fiercely as any other - including her childhood friend, Pantheon Pantheon - but she did not share their zeal for killing. She believed that the true worth of a soldier lay in her ability to defend and protect.

When it came time for her Rite of Kor, a ceremony in which two Rakkor teens battle to the death for the right to bear a relic-weapon, Leona refused to fight. For this, the Rakkor leaders ordered her execution, but when they tried to strike the fatal blow, sunlight burst forth, bathing Mount Targon in light.

As it faded, Leona stood unharmed and her executioners lay unconscious around her. The Solari immediately claimed Leona, demanding that her sentence be repealed. She donned the golden armor of the Solari and they bestowed upon her the sword sword and shield shield passed down from the ancient sun-warrior of legend.

The Solari helped Leona focus her abilities, and when she was ready she left to join the League of Legends.


References

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