Malphite

Malphite was not so much born as split away. He started as a servitor-shard of the Monolith, an otherworldly obelisk, charged with pouring his enormous elemental power into keeping that greater being intact for as long as he could. He failed at that single task, and the failure took away everything he had known. As a tank equally able to hold the top lane or the center of the jungle, he approaches every battle the way he once approached his old duty: as something to get through, not something to savor.

When the Monolith was finally destroyed, Malphite was the only fragment still standing. It was an ending he never anticipated and has yet to fully come to terms with. He is left with a frame of living stone and a purpose that no longer has anything to protect. Runeterra’s inhabitants seem to him soft and forever shifting in ways his obelisk never was, and much of his existence goes to bearing that gap while he tries to work out what a shard with no whole to belong to is supposed to do now.

His combat style feels like an effort to bring order to a world that keeps resisting it. Ground Slam punishes anyone who stands too close, sending out a shockwave whose strength depends on his own Armor. Seismic Shard pulls at enemies who try to back away, and Thunderclap turns a chain of his basic attacks into rolling aftershocks. Unstoppable Force, his ultimate, hurls him bodily into a crowd: blunt, decisive, and about as far from patient negotiation as a being of stone can be. Even so, he has found an odd kind of companionship in Ixtal‘s jungle, where he meets hunters such as Rengar and Nidalee, each of whom knows solitude from a very different vantage point. Other wanderers of the same jungle, Qiyana among them, regard Ixtal’s solitude as their own territory; Malphite still regards it as simply the place where he happened to land.