"In a riot of life-energy, Ivern the Cruel was instantly undone." Riot's biography of Ivern is two lives with one sentence between them, and the sentence is not a death. A raider swung an axe at the most sacred tree in Ionia, and perhaps in Runeterra, since the biography calls its grove the Heart of the World; the tree fell, and what stood up afterwards was all that remained of it.
Who they are
He was Ivern the Cruel, a fierce warrior of the latter days of the ancient Vorrijaard, whose clan followed the most warlike of the old gods and would not kneel to the upstart Three Sisters as so many others had. The dark sorcery behind the Iceborn armies could not be denied, so Ivern and his kin sailed east, toward the land where the sun first rose and from which, it was said, all magic flowed into the world, to seize that power and break their enemies. The fleet passed over the horizon and into myth, and was never seen at home again.
It had landed in Ionia. Ivern cut through a dozen coastal settlements before he and his warriors found the sacred grove of Omikayalan, the Heart of the World, where chimeric beings, half human and half beast, came at them under the twisted branches. The battered remnant of his expedition reached the God-Willow, a colossal tree dripping with gossamer leaves that shimmered golden-green, a magic he had never felt and one these creatures would plainly die for. To break them, he took his war axe to it, roaring, until it fell.
What happened next the biography tells from the inside. Detached and drifting, Ivern watched the dead feed carrion birds and insects, rot into soil and sprout into trees with fruit of their own; life exploded out of death in more ways than he could believe, and he wept. The tears fell on a changed body, taller than he remembered, its limbs rough with bark and leaves, and he understood that he was all that now remained of the God-Willow. He heard hills bawl and trees howl, remembered his cruelty, and cried out for forgiveness. By the time he moved again so much time had passed that the world felt new, and he found he could dig his toes into the soil and talk with roots, rocks and rivers. Even the dirt had opinions.
He has wandered since, across Ionia and beyond, with Omikayalan's strange magic following in his wake. He befriends creatures great and small, plays tricks with bramblebacks, and when he found a wounded stone golem whose spirit was fading he made her a new heart from a river pebble and named her Daisy, for the flowers that sprouted from her stone. Mortals call him Bramblefoot, Green Father or the Old Woodsman, and he keeps away from them, saddened by how much they take and how careless they are. But if he carries the God-Willow's legacy, he reasons, his task is to help humanity watch, listen and grow, and he has challenged himself to finish before the final sunset. He expects to have the time.
Where they belong
Riot's faction pages put Ivern in Ionia, where he was remade, though the biography starts him elsewhere: the ancient Vorrijaard, a homeland it never names as a region, whose enemies, the Iceborn and the Three Sisters, are the ones this site covers in the Freljord. No race is listed for him on Riot's pages; the text's own description is a man who is now all that remains of a tree.
Riot lists one related champion:
- Lillia: not named in Ivern's biography. The link Riot draws is presumably the forests of Ionia; the text offers no scene.
In the Riot MMO, as a guess
This is speculation. Ivern is a quest-giving character of the kind every MMO puts in its deepest forest, and the biography supplies what usually has to be invented: a name the locals use, a companion, a reason to help, and a reason to be hard to find. He is alive, he does not appear to age, and his stated task, teaching mortals to watch and listen and grow, is a questline with no natural end. Omikayalan is the other asset, a sacred grove with a felled God-Willow at its centre, which the text describes and leaves unvisited. He is a boss only in the era before the axe. Whether champions can be helpers rather than encounters 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 the Green Father or Ivern the Cruel. He was changed in the days of the ancient Vorrijaard, so nearly any era finds him as he is now; only a very early one finds a raider.
What became of the chimeric guardians of Omikayalan, and what the grove is today. The biography leaves both with the fallen tree, and Riot has not said.