"Her creators wanted an assassin, but all she wanted was to eat, eat, EAT!" Riot's biography of the Restrained Hunger is written with more jokes than any other in this batch, and the jokes are how it delivers the facts: the Black Rose built a weapon out of blood, the weapon ate its handler, and the pillory on her neck is the only thing anyone has found that focuses her. She is loose in Runeterra now, and she has decided for herself when the lock goes on.
Who they are
Near the end of his reign, Grand General Boram Darkwill entrusted the Black Rose and its hemomancers with making a new kind of living weapon: not another experiment on the dead, but a being born from blood and fuelled by it, able to hunt without food or water. Briar was the result. Her first mission ended in a frenzied, gory failure, and the cabal judged her too dangerous to use and too powerful to destroy, so they built a special pillory, locked with a hemolith gemstone, to restrain her and focus her mind. Then they used her anyway, deploying her with the rest of their living weapons during Jericho Swain's coup against Darkwill.
She was given a handler to point her. Released from the pillory, she ate him and everyone nearby, everyone except her target, Swain, who escaped while she fed on friend and foe alike. Swain's guards eventually triggered the pillory again and transferred her to a holding facility, where she sat in a cell, unable to starve to death and weakening daily without fresh blood. The wailing she took at first for her own hunger turned out to be neighbours: other living weapons, she guessed, captured after failing their missions in the coup, and all they ever talked about was blood. Their hemomania, the text says, was the most boring thing she had ever experienced, and the thought that breaking out might make her like them was too horrifying to dwell on.
Years passed. She eavesdropped on guards, pestered them for raw meat, and agonised over whether to race her pet spiders or eat them. Then, toying with the pillory one day, she loosened the hemolith to a point just short of unlocking it, and had the realisation the biography builds toward: being under control was as dangerous as being out of it, and she wanted the balance. She worked out the mechanism, lured a guard close, and nobody noticed he was gone until it was too late. She now roams the streets of Noxus with the pillory locked, until she wants it unlocked, making friends and discoveries in a world she is starving to experience, while the Black Rose watches a development it did not expect.
Where they belong
Riot places Briar in Noxus, and the biography is entirely Noxian: Darkwill's court, the Black Rose, Swain's coup, a holding facility and, now, the capital's streets.
Riot lists four related champions:
- Swain: the target she was sent to kill during the coup, and the only person in the room she did not eat; his guards put her back in the pillory.
- Sion: not named in Briar's biography, though the Black Rose's earlier experiments on the deceased are.
- Talon: not named.
- Vladimir: not named. The hemomancers who made her are a group, not a person, in this text.
In the Riot MMO, as a guess
This is speculation. Briar is a boss first, and an unusual one, because the lore makes the fight conditional: with the pillory on she is a person, with it off she is a frenzy, and the text is explicit that she now decides which. That is a two-phase encounter with a story reason for the phases. She could also be a quest-giver, since the biography ends with her making friends and wanting to learn everything, and a hungry, cheerful contact in Noxus who might eat you is a rare tone for a fantasy hub. Her cellmates, the other living weapons still wailing in the facility, are a dungeon nobody has to invent. Whether any champion is playable is the question in will champions be playable.
What we do not know
Whether the game's era, the open question in when is the Riot MMO set?, comes after her escape or before she was made. The biography ties her creation to Darkwill's last years and Swain's coup, so an earlier game would not have her.
What the Black Rose intends to do about her. The text says they are monitoring, and no more.