Taliyah walked on the small road, stopping by a sign to read it. It said: 'Noxus territory'. She jumped a bit in excitement and anticipation. Living her whole life in the Shurima desert, as a part of her tribe, she wasn't familiar with big cities. The biggest one she ever saw was the sunken city of Shurima. There were a few old tribes that still prayed to the dead gods and waited for a new one to arise and rebuild the mythical city, but Taliyah had always ignored them. The city broke apart before her grandparents were even born, and the 'gods' could have retaken them a long time ago. As she heard from the eldest of her tribe, the only reason why Shurima got so prosperous was because half of it's population were slaves. So if the gods returned, they would need to make new slaves. And of course, the first slaves would be the people that stopped believing in them, so her tribe would be in a very bad position.


At a point in time, the people of her tribe stopped believing in Shuriman gods and started praying to the great Stoneweaver. The legend of the great Stoneweaver said that one day, when the gods return, a stoneweaver will be born. That said child would have the power to control everything that was made of stone. When the child had grown, it would go on and defeat Azir, the ruler of Shurima.

There had already been a Stoneweaver when Azir had woken up last time. But the Stoneweaver failed and Azir ruled over Shurima a painful long time before he was defeated by something nobody knew what it was.

Like the gods, the Stoneweaver's were still real, even though nobody had seen one in ages. Well, until now. She had been raised to look up to the weavers, and seek their assistance at difficult times. But Taliyah wasn't raised to be a stoneweaver herself. At the age of 11, when she first discovered her powers, she decided to keep it a secret until she was in full control of her powers. But as much as she tried, she never could.

After 7 years, the only thing Taliyah could willingly do was take a tiny pebble and size it up to a stone. Everything else came unpredictably. So it was at the age of 18 that Taliyah decided to show her powers to her tribe. At the weekly meeting, she said that she had something to say. So everybody sat down and listened, while she stood up and said: "Watch." She took a small pebble from the floor and concentrated. She imagined how that pebble grew and changed its form to a cube. At the same time, the pebble started to change excactly the way she imagined. As she finished transforming the small stone, she stood there, panting from exhaustion.

After a long way standing there, her father stood and looked her in the eye. "Taliy.." He couldn't finish before she pushed him away, surely saving his life as a huge rock landed on the position he was standing on with a great 'whoomp'. The members of the tribe shot around in panic, trying to avoid death from the sudden rain of rocks and pebbles falling from above. Taliyah quickly tried to change the shapes of the falling rocks to pebbles, but she didn't have the strength. In a desperate move to try and save the lives of her people, she wanted to create something that would hold of the stones, but the moment she started thinking about it everything went black.

When she woke up again, she could see that most of the tents got absolutely destroyed and their remaining pieces were lying around on the desert. As Taliyah stood up she realized she was untouched, no bruise, no cuts, nothing. Her gaze wandered over the are where all the stones had fallen. As Taliyah walked around, she saw that not only rocks had fallen, but some people from her tribe had fallen too. Tears started to rise as she saw her parents holding holding hands while they were lying unconcious on the sand, and the tears really began to flow as she saw a childhood friend who was dead on the ground, having a very sharp stone piercing his body about where his heart is.

Tears started to drop as Taliyah realized that this was all her fault. While she had transformed that pebble she had unwillingly changed something in the mountain behind them, which led to the mountain collapsing on top of them. She started to run away, her eyes now acting like tiny waterfalls. She swore to herself to never use her powers again until she had found a master to teach her. After all, she may have wiped out her tribe just by making a silly mistake which happened because she couldn't control her power.

Running away was the easy part though. She had nothing to eat or drink and no idea where she was going. For two months, Taliyah fled from the disaster and just went north, because the only thing she had to help her find her way through the desert was the compass her father had given her for her 16. birthday. She went north and started to eat everything she could find. A small rat, a lizard, rotten plants and so forth. Drinking wasn't a problem since the cactuses which you could find everywhere had some juice inside. She could slice the cactus with a sharp stone and drink from it.

But food wasn't the only problem. Even though her body had weakened from the food she was eating, the mental toll was way bigger. In that journey she had nearly killed herself several times. The thought that she had maybe killed her whole tribe made her sick, mad at her power and mad at the great stoneweaver who had chosen her over everybody else.


She had cried so many times about that on her journey, she was just about to go mad. Luckily, as she walked up a hill, she saw a huge city. Much bigger than she had expected and also much more impressive than she had expected. Most of the buildings were black, with a few redish ones. The city pretty sure had a sinister look, but Taliyah didn't care. Also, the more you looked at it, the more you got used to it. If you didn't consider the colors, Noxus would look quite impressive and beautiful. But the size of the city was still undeniably enormous. She just stood atop the hill for at least 10 minutes and stared in awe at the massive buildings beneath her.

So this is Noxus.