"As if to confirm those fears, their uncle was killed in the line of duty by a mage, before Garen turned eleven." Riot's biography of Garen puts his whole politics in that one death. Everything the Sword-Captain of the Dauntless Vanguard believes about magic was decided by a boy of ten watching his family grieve, and the biography's cruelty is that the next mage in his life is his sister. Few characters in Runeterra are handed a conflict that tidy.
Who they are
He was born a Crownguard, one of Demacia's noble families, with a younger sister, Lux, a decorated officer for a father, Pieter, and an aunt, Tianna, who was Sword-Captain of the elite Dauntless Vanguard. Both were respected by King Jarvan III, and it was assumed the boy would one day serve the king's son the same way. Demacia had risen from the ashes of the Rune Wars and the centuries since had been full of conflict. An uncle who was a ranger-knight told the children stories of the world beyond the walls and warned them that something, rogue mages, creatures of the abyss or a horror nobody had imagined, would one day end the peace. Then a mage killed him. Garen saw his family's pain and the fear in his sister's eyes, and vowed that magic would never come within Demacia's walls.
At twelve he left the family home in High Silvermere for the military. Among the squires he met the young prince, Jarvan IV, and the two became inseparable. He earned his place in the shieldwall, and by eighteen had served on the Freljordian borders, helped purge cultists from the Silent Forest and fought beside the defenders of Whiterock. The king summoned his battalion to the Great City to be honoured in the Hall of Valor, and Tianna, newly High Marshal, put her nephew forward for the Dauntless Vanguard's trials.
He went home first, and the visit is the biography's real subject. Lux had grown into an intelligent, capable young woman, and something about her had changed. Garen wrestled with a gnawing suspicion that she had magical powers and refused to hold the thought for long; a Crownguard capable of the sorcery that killed their uncle was too much to confront. He won his place in the Vanguard and took his oaths before the throne with his family and the prince watching. Then, while Lux and their mother spent more time in the capital serving the king and the Illuminators, he kept his distance. The text says he loved his sister more than anything in the world and could not get close to her, because he did not want to think about what he would be forced to do if he were right. He fought and trained twice as hard instead. When the Vanguard's Sword-Captain fell in battle, his fellow warriors nominated him for command, unopposed.
Where they belong
Riot's faction pages put Garen in Demacia, and no champion on the roster is more of one place: born there, sworn there, commanding its elite. No race is listed for him on Riot's pages; the biography gives him a human family and a human's fear.
Riot lists three related champions:
- Lux: his younger sister, whom he suspects of the magic he has sworn to keep out of Demacia. The biography is built around the fact that he has never asked her.
- Jarvan IV: the prince he met as a squire and has been inseparable from since, and the future king he was raised to serve.
- Quinn: not named in Garen's biography. The link Riot draws is Demacia's military, not a scene in the text.
In the Riot MMO, as a guess
This is speculation. Garen is a quest-giving character of the most conventional kind, and that is a compliment: the commander of Demacia's finest soldiers, alive, stationed in the capital, with borders to patrol and cultists to purge, is the officer who hands a new player their first orders in most MMOs ever made. The biography adds the thing convention lacks. Every order he gives carries the question he will not ask his sister, and a Demacian storyline that made a player choose between his law and her secret would be using the text rather than inventing one. He is a boss only for a player fighting Demacia, which the lore permits and a starting zone probably would not. Whether champions can hand out quests at all is the question in will champions be playable.
What we do not know
Whether the era the game chooses, the open question in when is the Riot MMO set?, finds Garen alive, and at which point of his career: a squire beside the prince, or the Sword-Captain the biography leaves him as.
Whether he ever confirms what he suspects about Lux. The biography ends with the question unasked, and Riot has not said.