"They said farewell in every clash of steel, but in the end Fiora tearfully buried her rapier in her father's heart." Riot's biography of the Grand Duelist is a court scandal with a body at the end, and the body is her father's. Sebastien Laurent cheated to save the family from a duel his daughter had accepted; the law would have hanged him; she asked the king to let her fight him instead. In Demacia, the most honour-bound kingdom in Runeterra's telling, that is how a daughter inherits a house.
Who they are
As the youngest daughter of the Laurents, Fiora was meant to be married off in Demacia's game of alliances, and she refused from the start: she gave the lifelike dolls her mother commissioned to her maids and took up her eldest brother's rapier, forcing him to teach her in secret, and used the dressmaking mannequins her father bought to practise lunges. A politically useful marriage was arranged all the same, to an outlying branch of the Crownguard family, for a summer wedding in the capital with King Jarvan III attending. As the guests arrived, Fiora stood and said she would sooner die than let someone else decide her life. Her betrothed was shamed in public, and his family demanded satisfaction the old way: a duel to the death.
She accepted at once. Her father Sebastien begged the king to intervene, but Jarvan, who had worked to end such feuds, could do nothing once she had agreed, so Sebastien invoked his right to fight in her place. High Marshal Tianna Crownguard named a veteran of the Dauntless Vanguard as her kinsman's champion, and Sebastien's defeat looked certain, with the Laurent name ruined and Fiora exiled after it. The night before, he tried to slip his opponent a draught to dull his senses, and was caught. The law was clear: he had broken the most fundamental code of honour and would hang like a common criminal. Fiora visited his cell on the eve of the execution, and what passed between them is known only to her.
The next day she knelt before the king in front of the crowd and offered her blade: with his blessing she would take the Laurent name from her father, and justice would be done. The duel was blindingly fast, a dance those present never forgot. Sebastien was a fine swordsman and no match for his daughter. The king ruled his crimes paid in full, named Fiora his successor, and declared the quarrel ended. The gossip did not end. She had usurped her brothers, would not take a husband, and the court asked what such a child could bring the Great City but strife. Rather than answer with her sword, she gathered her wider family, cousins and distant relatives with many renowned swordmasters among them, granted noble status to everyone in her household, and dedicated the house to bladecraft. Duelling, she holds, need not always end in death. Anyone who disagrees is welcome to test the point.
Where they belong
Riot places Fiora in Demacia, and the biography is the kingdom's court from inside a great house: the Laurents, the Crownguards, the Dauntless Vanguard, and a king who wanted the feuding to stop.
Riot lists three related champions:
- Jarvan IV: not named. The king in Fiora's biography is Jarvan III, who attends the wedding and rules on the duel.
- Garen: not named, though his family is: the marriage was to a branch of the Crownguards, and Tianna Crownguard named the champion against her father.
- Jax: not named in the text.
In the Riot MMO, as a guess
This is speculation. Fiora is a quest-giving character of a specific and useful kind: the duelling master. Her biography ends with a noble house dedicated to bladecraft, which is a trainer, a school, and a ladder of challengers in one, and the most natural home in Demacia for one-on-one PvP; what Riot might do with duels is our reading in Riot MMO PvP. She is a boss only in the ceremonial sense, the last opponent on that ladder, and the text says she takes challengers happily. Not a companion: the biography's Fiora leads a house and does not follow anyone. 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?, finds her alive and the Laurents restored. The biography places the duel in the reign of Jarvan III and gives no date.
What she and her father said in his cell. The text says the secret is hers.