Karthus

The last thing most people hear before Karthus arrives is a song, if they hear anything at all.

He is an undying spirit from the Shadow Isles. Where the living shudder at the idea of lasting forever as something neither alive nor truly dead, Karthus sees only loveliness. He doesn’t regard undeath as a curse to flee but as a state worth embracing, and every time he walks among mortals he sets out to convince them of it, usually by leaving corpses in his wake.

Other wanderers of the Shadow Isles, Kalista included, pursue their own bleak goals through the same mist. Karthus cares less about revenge than about ritual. He acts less like a hunter and more like a missionary, spreading his idea of death’s joy to whoever happens to be close enough to hear it.

Dying does not slow him down. Death Defied, his passive, keeps his spells available for a brief period after he has been killed, which suits a spirit that never treated death as the finish line. Lay Waste strikes an area with damage that builds over time and hits hardest against targets standing alone. Wall of Pain reduces Move Speed and Magic Resist for any enemy who passes through it. Defile drains energy from nearby foes and refills his own mana. His ultimate, Requiem, requires a three-second channel before it hits every enemy champion on the map simultaneously, a suitably grand finish for someone who has rarely been concerned with the limits of one fight, or one life.

He is a mage confined to mid lane, and like nearly every other caster in Runeterra he depends on mana, which makes the rest of his kit seem even stranger. What defines him most as a spellcaster is that he keeps fighting after he has been killed in the fight. Even his song, which those who have heard it rarely mention, seems to mean less to him than the silence that comes after.