Viego

Viego once governed a kingdom that is now gone. More than a thousand years ago, he attempted to restore his dead wife to life, and the effort failed so catastrophically that it set off the Ruination, the disaster that remade the territory now called the Shadow Isles, a withered archipelago where death has not truly been final ever since.

Viego did not come out of that attempt as a living monarch. He persists as an undead specter, gripped by yearning for a queen who has lain in the ground for centuries, and that obsession has never released him.

As the Ruined King, Viego leads the Harrowings and sweeps across Runeterra in search of a way to reverse his queen’s death. Wherever the search carries him, the Black Mist spills from the remnants of his heart. Senna bears the scars of that same Ruination, while Thresh serves him outright. Two very different outcomes stem from a single failed ritual.

In combat he behaves like a fighter who reaches like an assassin. He is suited to the top lane or the middle lane alike, though neither lane really captures what drives him. His abilities echo that craving for control. Sovereign’s Domination allows him to take over the body of any enemy that dies close to him, restoring his health through the possession and granting what amounts to an extra life for each kill. Blade of the Ruined King inflicts bonus damage scaled to a target’s current health and can be activated to siphon off even more of it. Spectral Maw gathers power before a dash that stuns the first enemy it strikes. Harrowed Path lets him take hold of a patch of terrain and conceal himself within the Black Mist as a camouflaged wraith. Heartbreaker, his ultimate, blinks him onto a target for an execution that hurls their allies clear of the blast. Appropriately for something that no longer counts as alive, he runs on no mana, energy, or any conventional resource. None of this has ever brought his queen back.