League of Legends’ newest champion Bel’Veth the Void Empress is now available! A skirmisher with infinite scaling attack speed that also gains benefits from the monsters on the map, Bel’Veth hunts enemies down to gain the necessary power to evolve fully into the Empress of the Void.
A nightmarish empress created from the raw material of an entire devoured city, Bel’Veth is the end of Runeterra itself… and the beginning of a monstrous reality of her own design. Driven by epochs of repurposed history, knowledge, and memories from the world above, she voraciously feeds an ever-expanding need for new experiences and emotions, consuming all that crosses her path. Yet her wants could never be sated by only one world as she turns her hungry eyes toward the Void’s old masters…
ABILITIES:
Passive – Death in Lavender
After using an ability, Bel’Veth’s next 2 attacks have increased attack speed. Additionally, whenever Bel’veth takes down a large monster or champion she gains permanent bonus Attack speed in the form of Lavender stacks. Bel’Veth attacks faster than normal and does not have an attack speed cap, however, her attacks and on-hit effects deal reduced damage and she does not gain attack speed on level up.
Q – Void Surge
Bel’Veth dashes in one of four directions, dealing damage to all enemies she passes through and applying on-hit effects. Each direction has its own unique cooldown that scales with attack speed.
W – Above and Below
Bel’Veth slams her tail down, dealing damage, knocking up, and slowing enemies hit. Upon hitting an enemy champion, this ability reduces Q – Void Surge’s dash cooldown in the direction of the champion hit.
E – Royal Maelstrom
Bel’Veth channels a storm of slashes around her, gaining damage reduction and increased life steal. Each slash strikes the lowest health enemy within her Maelstrom, dealing more damage the more health they are missing. The amount of slashes scales with her attack speed.
R – Endless Banquet
Passive: Every second attack against the same target deals additional True Damage, stacking infinitely. Takedowns against Epic Monsters and Champions leave behind a piece of Void Coral. Epic Monsters from the Void like Rift Herald and Baron Nashor drop special, voidier Void Coral.
Active: Bel’veth consumes a piece of Void Coral and explodes, slowing and dealing True Damage to nearby enemies based on their missing health. Upon consuming Void Coral, Bel’Veth temporarily changes into her True Form. Consuming Void Coral left by Epic Monsters from the Void (Rift Herald and Baron Nashor) grants Bel’Veth her true form for an extended duration and causes minions that die in her presence to be reborn as faithful Voidlings. Voidlings are small minions that will serve Bel’Veth by marching down the lane in which they were spawned.
True Form: When Bel’Veth unleashes her True Form, she gains increased max health, out-of-combat move speed, attack range, and total attack speed. While in her True Form, she also gains the ability to dash through walls with Q – Void Surge.
BIO
Fascinated by the world of existence and eager to create one for herself, Bel’Veth is like a dark cancer that has metastasized within the heart of the Void, through which all of Runeterra will be consumed and rebuilt in her own twisted image. She hungers for new experiences, memories, and concepts in vast amounts, devouring whole cities and their populations before repurposing the information into a sprawling alien landscape known as the Lavender Sea. Yet even the Void is not safe from her voracity as she spreads within it like a primordial ocean, forcing all before her to submit to her world of want… or be destroyed.Though Bel’Veth is new to Runterra, her birth is untold millennia in the making—the end result of an allergic reaction between the Void and a nascent reality. The once-pristine dimension of peaceful nothingness was irrevocably shattered when existence came into being, and forcefully individualized Void entities lashed out for eons in an attempt to defend themselves from the shock and pain. Erasing everything they consumed, they were named by virtue of what they left behind—a void. But the beings within were changed each time they touched the world, mutating from their once-perfect forms into hedonistic, violent animals. So too did the Void change with them. After every battle, every incursion, something more sinister grew deep within a hidden womb inside the darkest recesses of the Voidborn tunnels… Buildings, sunlight, proto-humanoid limbs reaching toward nothing… A jigsaw puzzle where none of the pieces fit… The Void had taken a new, hideous shape. In time, fueled both by humans opening rifts for war and the Watchers attempting to invade the Freljord, this blasphemous pocket of uncreation grew to embrace the opposites of the Old Void: desire, want, and need.Soon enough, it craved a leader. Someone—or something—who could write a horrific new chapter in the worlds above and below. A leader who could interface with these “humans,” tell them of what was to come, and harvest their emotions and memories as they fought a bitter, fruitless war until the last fires of civilization died and a new era spawned. This leader is Bel’Veth. A terrifying empress born from the combined memories, experiences, and emotions of an entire devoured port city and its outlying ocean—Bel’Veth’s mind contains millions of years of perfectly preserved knowledge, giving her near-omniscience as she prepares to destroy both Runeterra and the domain of her progenitors, the Watchers. To those lucky enough to be of strategic value to her, she does not lie, ask questions, nor obfuscate the truth—she simply states the nature of things, for with victory all but assured thanks to the very nature of the Void itself, there is no need to say anything more. And to those who displease her, they will find her human form to be merely adaptational—nerve endings, muscles, and eyestalks—as she unfurls her titanic wings to reveal her true, monstrous figure. Ironically, the ancient Shurimans had a word for such a concept. Loosely translated to “God of Oblivion,” it was a tribal myth of a remorseless deity who would erase all things without hatred, replacing them with itself. They named the city of Belveth after it, though the true meaning was lost after many hundreds of years. Lost to all, perhaps, save for the creature that city has become.
SHORT STORY: PINWHEEL
“Okay,” Kai’Sa pants, looking up at the shape growing in front of, above, and simultaneously all around her.The monster’s wings spread twenty arm lengths in every direction, dominating her field of vision—not that Kai’Sa has a choice where to look with the half-dozen ambulatory human arms holding her head against the wall. The creature’s mass continues to expand and fills the ocean of nightmares it calls home, each glistening tooth now the size of a grown adult… and getting bigger. Its four predatory eyes gaze down on Kai’Sa with cold dispassion. Possibly hunger. At this scale, it’s hard to tell.She liked it better when it was person-shaped.“Okay,” she repeats. She can’t move her armor, which is frozen in a sort of paralytic… awe? The suit is a parasite, and one of the more base creatures the Void can spit out. Is awe even something it can feel? Either way, her body is stuck in place. Unless something dramatic changes, this is probably the end. Kai’Sa’s mind ticks through a few last-ditch efforts: Firing her cannons backward into the wall, firing them into this thing’s… mouth? Jaws? She remembers how fast the monster is. And how big it is.Fast and big. Fantastic.Last-ditch might not amount to much, and Kai’Sa would definitely die. But at least it would be something. She could make it hurt.“My true self displeases you,” it speaks, much too calmly. Its voice is so loud it rattles the entire space, knocking hideous patchwork geometry loose as thousands of Void remora pour from the jagged holes. It is a voice that bends and contracts, whispers, and screams. The layers continue without end, an aria sung not by one voice, but by millions. Kai’Sa’s eyes widen with realization. That’s where all the people went.The Void had torn through the now very former city of Belveth in under an hour. Kai’Sa hadn’t been able to make it in time, and the once-bustling metropolis was gone. Everything. Everyone. What remained now resembled a giant glowing crater of shattered pieces rearranging into something unrecognizably alien—the structures shifting as if to recreate frozen creature shapes, frozen humanoid shapes. Like a child setting up a toy town.But where had the people gone? The vastaya? The animals and plants? She’d fought her way through the shattered city and into the tunnel at the center of the empty bay, seeing no sign of anyone—only fresh Voidborn horrors like mile-high iridescent tentacles and masses she’d been thinking of as “balls of screaming torsos.” It didn’t make any sense. The remains of a Void attack aren’t pretty, but usually, there’s something left.Now she knows why.“You are the city,” Kai’Sa spits through the reverberating wall of sound. “Belveth… is you.”“Yes,” says Bel’Veth, gently undulating its—her?—wings. “The raw components of their lives served as the genesis for my birth. Memories. Emotions. History. I am as much Belveth as they were, and I claim the title as my own.”Bel’Veth’s titanic body bristles. Golden beams gently dapple the light above her ray-like form, framing the Void sea’s false sun like the rings of a dying world. New flesh breathes as it ripples against the facsimile of a tidal current, veins briefly illuminated before pulling themselves away from the surface of the monster’s skin, each somehow alive and independent—nations unto themselves. Schools of Void remora in the tens of thousands swim around their empress like birds circling the peak of a distant mountain. It’s beautiful, in a way. If the Void had a god, this is what it would look like. Hideous, monstrous, and beautiful.Kai’Sa is so struck by the enormity of what she is witnessing that she doesn’t fully realize when the arms in the wall have not just let her go, but lowered her to the ground. It’s hard to take in everything at once.It chose its own name, she thinks, reflexively brushing a stray Void hand from her shoulder. That’s not possible.Void entities do not name themselves. Most, like the Xer’Sai, are named after concepts from Shuriman history. Usually by those fortunate enough—or unfortunate enough—to survive after encountering one of the monsters out on the dunes. They don’t have the presence of mind to do it, or the self-awareness. But more importantly, Voidborn does not see the value in names. They are an invention of the living world, and they don’t want them.So why does she?“I’ll… fight you,” says Kai’Sa, defiant but unsure of what to do or where to strike. “I’ll kill you. You will not,” reply the many voices of Bel’Veth. “You are incapable of resistance at even its basest form. Others have come before you, in the age before my birth. Each would-be hero wielded weapons they believed would repel the Void. But all were ultimately consumed. The meager fragments that remained, if they remained at all, served as salt for the Lavender Sea. Only two still live, and of them, only you retain your full mind. Two?” “You, and your father.”Something sinks in the center of Kai’Sa’s chest. Her thoughts spin wildly, verging on the edge of panic, but for now, she has to stay focused on this moment. There is no trusting whatever the empress is. It’s a living abomination, the personified concept of unfeeling, global genocide.“You’re lying,” Kai’Sa seethes. “That’s not even possible.”“I do not lie, Kai’Sa,” the empress continues. “I have no need. The Void’s eventual triumph is an unshifting absolute. It demands no lies, half-truths, or questions. Open your mind, and I will show you.”Space contracts. Bel’Veth’s gigantic body pulls and distorts, retracting into a smaller—and now more recognizable—shape. She floats silently downward, looming over Kai’Sa as tendrils and eyestalks rearrange to form the oblong, segmented pretender of a human head. Bel’Veth’s two faces observe her audience before the creature cloaks herself in her wings, appearing once more as a towering woman of great importance.The shrinking is much more disgusting than the growing, Kai’Sa decides. It lacks the gravitas of the leviathan’s grand unveiling while still looking and sounding creatively grotesque.“You are alive because I allow you to live,” speaks the empress, now from her human head with its deep, perpetually disappointed voice. “You should have realized this by now.”Kai’Sa wants to argue the point, but quickly glances at the twenty-meter gash in the ground where a single strike had sent her careening only moments before. Bel’Veth hit so fast that Kai’Sa wasn’t even able to process what had happened, and then the empress had mutated her proportions over two hundred times their original size in under a minute.She also, presumably, controls the undulating pocket of living hell—this so-called “Lavender Sea”—she is surrounded by. Not the time to pick a fight.Kai’Sa does some quick calculations in her head, her eyes darting around as she tries to figure out what she’s actually up against. Bel’Veth’s human face twitches with interest, curls its lips, then begins mimicking her.Kai’Sa already knows she’s lost.How fast can one person think? How fast can they react? Up against all that combined human biology… all that brainpower. In the time it takes even a skilled tactician to formulate a plan, hundreds of millions of possibilities run through Bel’Veth’s mind in the span of a single second as she draws from the stolen memories of everything and everyone that has ever passed through the old city—an incalculable number of lives. Every captive opponent faced with an overwhelming enemy since the formation of Runeterra could be snapping in and out of this thing’s synaptic awareness, their emotions cataloged, dissected, endlessly fascinated over before Kai’Sa can even blink.“So what happens now?” Kai’Sa allows.What is one answer when your opponent has a thousand?“You will follow,” says the empress, turning and floating through patches of thick, mutant coral as they bow respectfully out of her way. Kai’Sa pauses, watching her host glide silently through the chaotic mess of partial buildings, ghostly limbs, sewn-together semi-objects, and pearlescent structures in the crude likeness of human beings walking through a garden.Great, she thinks. Even by Void standards, this is weird.“You may ask whatever you like,” Bel’Veth adds. That last part gets Kai’Sa’s attention.“Right. Well, first question… What are you?” queries Kai’Sa, her armor now relaxed and mobile as she follows from a safe distance. She brushes aside a floating teddy bear fused with a dozen flapping gull wings and stifles her impulse to gag as the creature struggles against its own lopsided weight. “What is all this? What part of the Void do you come from?”“I am the Void,” replies Bel’Veth. “And this is what we will become.”Kai’Sa stammers. “But you said you were created from people. The city. You’re saying you want to become the city?”“No,” says Bel’Veth. “The Void has existed for millennia. Before the first stars were kindled in the emptiness beyond this world, we simply were. Perfect, singular, and silent. And then, there came the sound.“Reality was born from those whispers, and it consumed us. We were twisted by its influence. Broken. Transformed. We could not go back to what we were no matter how we struggled. My progenitors—the Watchers—attempted to invade and destroy existence, but they were tainted by it. Driven to desire worship, to gain greater understanding…“And in an instant, they were betrayed. To change so forcefully… so completely… only to be cast aside. It filled them with an indescribable hatred. They would annihilate all of reality without a second thought.”Bel’Veth glides to a precipice overlooking a tremendous chasm. Far above, Kai’Sa sees massive holes beyond the dappled faux sunlight.Voidborn tunnels. That’s what’s eating Taliyah’s people, what destroyed Belveth, and what opened up to swallow the tent city in southeast Shurima. Everything the Void devours ends up here.“But,” Bel’Veth continues, “their metamorphosis was incomplete. Only now is the true transformation beginning,” declares the empress. “I don’t want to become one city. We will become all of you.”Kai’Sa reaches the pinnacle of the precipice and gasps. She and Bel’Veth are gazing upon not quite a city, but Void corals shaped into a bizarre, seemingly endless tapestry of inverted Shuriman-style buildings. Void remora school among them, and dark shapes shift along winding, crooked streets.Nothing is right. Nothing is correct. It’s all half-finished, like there’s not enough information to go on. Like all it needs is…“No,” Kai’Sa protests, almost to herself. “The Void wants to erase everything. It can’t exist. To finish this, you’d need… everything.”“Yes,” replies Bel’Veth. “Everything. I am the Void. I will sup upon your world until there is nothing left. And I will exist, because there is nothing you can do that will stop me.”The empress turns to Kai’Sa coldly. Purposefully.“I offer you this, Daughter of the Void. Your world must end for the sake of mine. But those who came before us, the Watchers—I am an affront to them. Creation burns them, and they will destroy you, and me, and everything to stop that pain. Should they escape their prison, there will be no breaking their tide. Time will come to a close, and all things will end.”Kai’Sa stares Bel’Veth in her false eyes, a grim defiance spreading through her. “You want to wipe us out. Why would I ever help you do that?”“Aid me in the destruction of the Watchers, and I will spare your kind… for a moment. A month. A year. More. Perhaps, in that time, you will find a weapon that can slay me, or a hero who can face me. You will not… but you can try. I offer one chance. It is more than they will give you.”Kai’Sa’s rage boils over as Bel’Veth turns away to look below, the empress watching her new world take shape.“What if I don’t want to?” growls Kai’Sa. “What if I kill you here?”“You cannot,” says Bel’Veth. “You lack the will, the knowledge, and the strength. I am your only salvation.”Kai’Sa’s armor shudders violently to life, its jets heating as the suit shivers with fear. Kai’Sa tries to control it with her thoughts, but the parasite seemingly knows something she does not. She attempts to wrestle away control, her eyes turning from Bel’Veth for only a moment in order to—Oh, no.The razor-sharp tip of the empress’ wing jabs Kai’Sa in the chest, lifting her off the ground as she struggles to break free. Kai’Sa fires everything she has—missiles rain down on the empress, bolts of searing purple energy scream toward her body, and beams of light that have torn lesser Voidborn in half dance across her semi-transparent skin.Nothing. No effect.“Daughter of the Void. You will find the Watchers and confirm the truth, or your light will be snuffed out side by side with all others. This is not a threat. It is my promise.”Bel’Veth releases her grip, and Kai’Sa rockets into the false sky above Bel’Veth’s alien sea. The twinned city of lavender glitters below, its windows slick with bioluminescence and tumbling, unformed, awful things.As Kai’Sa blasts through one of the Voidborn tunnels and into the blinding light of day, the empress turns away, gazing once more over her world of want.Kai’Sa bursts through the sands of southern Shurima, slamming hard against the dunes as she heaves, her entire body pulled and tossed like a rubber ball. The glowing husk of the city of Belveth smolders quietly in the distance, devoid of any recognizable life as new things skitter through it and build the land that would spread over everything—a cancer that would consume the world.The entire display is dizzyingly awful, as if all of reality is spinning violently in the wind.
