"So enraged was Anivia at the outsiders' hubris and disrespect that she blasted them with a snowstorm that lasted a century and a day." Riot's biography of the Cryophoenix is a collection of things the Freljord's tribes say about her, and that is the most specific of them: a southern king marched north to claim the land's wild magic, and what is left of his army is a scatter of standing stones on the Scouring Plain. In Runeterra's north, the weather holds a grudge.
Who they are
Anivia is an ancient Freljordian demi-god, the biography says, bound up with the cycle of life, death and rebirth and with the turning of the seasons. To those who venerate her she is the elemental soul of the Freljord, a symbol of hope and a catalyst of change. Almost everything else in the text is attributed to someone: the songs of the nomadic Notai tribe, which say her hatching from a giant egg of ice threw the first snow into the sky; the sagas of the Mourncrow tribe, which say the Freljord's winds began with the first beats of her wings; and a belief the text calls one of the most respected, that her greatest gift to the land was True Ice, the unmelting substance the greatest seers and ice-mages have tried to use, a sliver of which makes a weapon deadly beyond belief.
When mortals first arrived, she welcomed them. Seeing they could not stand the cold, she guided them to sheltered valleys and watched over them for centuries while they hardened, and they worshipped her. She hoped they would stay united against outsiders. They did not; feuds made an invasion inevitable, and the southern king's army met the century of snow. The Avarosans tell of Ulla Shatter-Spear, an Iceborn warmother favoured by Anivia for saving a young hawk from a rimefang wolf, protected all her life and welcomed with open wings when she fell after almost a hundred winters.
Death does not keep her. The sagas say she has been slain a handful of times and always returns, though hundreds or thousands of years may pass, and each return marks the dawn of a new era, which makes her appearance both a blessing and a warning of something terrible coming. Once, the text says, she shattered her own body plunging into the ice beneath a march of towering Balestriders, to entomb them. Recently, some claim, she has hatched again and appeared before the new Avarosan leader, the Warmother Ashe. The biography ends on the obvious question: if she is back, what has she come to face?
Where they belong
Riot places Anivia in the Freljord, and the biography never leaves it: the Notai and Mourncrow songs, the Scouring Plain, True Ice, Avarosan legend, and now Ashe.
Riot's page lists no race for her. The text calls her a demi-god and a spirit-bird of ice.
Riot lists four related champions:
- Ornn: not named in Anivia's biography.
- Volibear: not named either.
- Ashe: the Warmother the Cryophoenix is said to have appeared before, in whom, the text suggests, she may see someone able to reunite the Freljord.
- Nunu & Willump: not named.
In the Riot MMO, as a guess
This is speculation. Anivia is a god, and the lore is firm that she cannot be killed for good, which rules out the ordinary boss: a fight against her is a fight against the season, and the text says her death is only a delay. She is not a quest-giver either, because the biography never has her speak to anyone; mortals glimpse her, or claim to. That leaves her as a presence. Her rebirth is written as a harbinger, the kind of event a story uses to announce that something terrible is on its way, and her appearance to Ashe is a scene a game could stage at the top of a Freljord arc. Whether any champion is more than a scene is the question in will champions be playable; for a demi-god the answer the text gives is that she is the weather.
What we do not know
Whether the game's era, the open question in when is the Riot MMO set?, finds her hatched. The biography says some claim she has returned, and hedges every line of it.
What she has come to face. The text asks the question and does not answer it.