"The temple quickly collapsed into ruins, with Hwei emerging as its only survivor." Riot's biography of Hwei is the story of a talent kept in check for decades and the one night it was not, and the ruins are the price. It is, for the Runeterra roster, an unusual origin: nobody conquers anything, and the villain leaves a calling card shaped like a lotus.
Who they are
Koyehn is an island in the north-west of Ionia, with golden sands, a seasonal bazaar, a mill town and an ancient conservatory for the arts, the Temple of Koyehn. Lukai Hwei was born to inherit it. A kind and precocious child, he painted his daydreams, which exaggerated the world into surreal sights; he knew they were not reality, but through them he saw life itself as art, and his eye colour shifted with his mood. His medium was paint magic, which the biography says influences the emotions of its audience and needs strict discipline, because it can overpower mind and body alike. Practitioners who could not control it were banished.
Young Hwei did not control it. In a demonstration for the temple masters he recreated Koyehn's sea, his control ebbed, emotion crashed through him and he surrendered to it; his last memory before blacking out was the masters, awestruck, drowning. He woke days later with all of them alive and furious. They would not exile the temple's heir, so they stressed his responsibilities, and he learned to keep two lives: by day he upheld Koyehn's conventions, and alone at night he pushed at the edges of his power, until his imagination could manifest a palette that flowed with magical paint. Well into adulthood he had mastered the craft and was ready to inherit. Part of his mind stayed in the dark.
Then the temple received a visiting artist, Khada Jhin. Over a gilded summer Hwei guided him around the island and came to respect his virtuosity. The night before Jhin left, he challenged his host: the pieces Hwei showed others were forced façades, and he wanted a real performance. Hwei's eyes gave him away. He painted the forbidden visions and found that sharing them was exhilarating. Jhin watched it all and said goodbye, saying he would be moving on "to watch the lotuses bloom".
At dawn the temple woke to three tragedies in fours: four historic paintings destroyed, four bodies arranged, the masters Hwei had nearly killed as a boy, and the fiery eruption of the temple's four lowest floors. In the flames Hwei's imagination bled outward, and he felt the horror and fascination of his youth. The temple collapsed with him the only survivor. By day he buried the dead with the villagers; at night he painted the wreckage, his palette taking the shape of Koyehn's crest, and beneath the rubble he found the remains of a trap petaled like a lotus flower. He understood who had done it, and the question the biography leaves burning is why. With a paintbrush and a palette he left his island and his people. Since then he has hunted nefarious individuals in Ionia's darkest corners, turning scenes of suffering on them to understand his own pain, and sought out Ionia's victims to make something calmer with them. Which shade of him wins, the text says, is yet to be seen.
Where they belong
Riot's faction pages put Hwei in Ionia, and the biography is specific to an island of it, Koyehn, in the north-west. No race is listed for him on Riot's pages.
Riot lists three related champions:
- Jhin: the visiting artist who spent a summer in Koyehn, provoked Hwei into a real performance, and left behind four bodies, a burning temple and a lotus-petaled trap.
- Shen: not named in Hwei's biography. The link Riot draws is Ionia, not a scene.
- Zed: not named either; the biography offers nothing that would connect them.
In the Riot MMO, as a guess
This is speculation. Hwei is a quest-giving character with a location attached, which is the useful combination: the ruins of the Temple of Koyehn are a site the biography describes and nobody has rebuilt, and the man who survived it is alive, moving through Ionia with a purpose a player can share. A questline that started in the wreckage and followed him after the people he hunts has its shape already, and its unanswered question, why Jhin did it, is the kind an MMO can keep open for years. He is not a boss, though his art can drown a room. Whether a champion can be a companion 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 Hwei alive and the temple standing or fallen. The biography dates nothing; a game set before that summer finds an heir and no story.
Why Jhin did it. The biography asks the question in Hwei's voice and does not answer it, and Riot has not said.