The Harrowing in LoL: 10 Facts About Runeterra's Own Halloween

Runeterra has a night where the dead come ashore, and it's on the calendar.

Ten things the lore actually says about the Harrowing, including why it ends at sunrise.

The Harrowing in LoL

10 Facts About Runeterra's Own Halloween

Lore

Runeterra has a night where the dead come ashore, and it's on the calendar.

Ten things the lore actually says about the Harrowing, including why it ends at sunrise.

Most players meet the Harrowing as a skin line. In the fiction it's a recurring event with rules, and the rules are worse than the skins let on.

#10: It's usually over in one night

The damned are vulnerable to sunlight (and to pure light generally), so a Harrowing tends to last exactly as long as the dark does.

Sunrise works as a curfew, in both directions.

#9: Bilgewater catches it more than anywhere else

A Harrowing can happen anywhere the Black Mist reaches, but it lands on Bilgewater most often. A port full of people who die violently and get buried at sea isn't a coincidence.

#8: Dying during one is worse than dying

Anyone killed by the spirits while the Mist is ashore is damned outright. When the Mist pulls back, their soul goes with it, across the water, to the Isles.

The people it takes are what the event is for.

#7: The mist used to be the good thing

Before the Ruination it was the White Mist (a natural enchantment that hid the Isles from anyone who came looking). Locals knew the way through and outsiders didn't.

That's why the Isles never bothered raising a standing army. The weather was the army.

#6: It catches you at the exact moment you die

The Black Mist traps whatever it touches in the instant of death and keeps it there. Only the strongest souls keep their own personality and their own wants intact through that, which is why the named ones are named.

Everything else in there is a mood with teeth.

#5: Killing a spirit works, and it doesn't last

Manifested spirits can be put down with the right tools (or by other spirits). It just isn't permanent. They go back into the Mist and wait.

Sometimes that wait is a few days. Sometimes it's centuries. Nothing in the source material says what decides which.

#4: The dangerous ones don't need a Harrowing at all

Weak spirits are stuck waiting for the event, because that's the only time they can hold a shape. The powerful ones can manifest whenever they want and wander well past the Isles while they're at it.

So the Harrowing is when everything else gets out.

#3: The mist is a road

A manifested spirit can travel anywhere the Black Mist touches. It doesn't sail or walk. It arrives.

That single sentence is what makes the Isles a problem for the whole map instead of a bad place you can simply avoid sailing near.

#2: Some people move there deliberately

Karthus went because he wanted to. His obsession with death led him to join the unliving on purpose.

Elise, weirdly, commutes. Every year she takes a handful of devoted followers back to the Isles and feeds them to Vilemaw, and the god pays her in venom that keeps her young. Then she sails home and recruits the next group.

#1: All of this used to be a university town

Helia was gardens, libraries, universities and houses of learning, built out of marble and gold by people borrowing ideas from across Runeterra. The architecture was full of deliberate hidden meaning, and some of the vaults under the city would only open at specific phases of the moon or angles of the sun.

Thresh keeps a castle in the ruins now. He calls it his Sanctum and he uses it to store souls he can come back and torture later.

Conclusions

The detail that gets me is a plant. The nightbloom is a red flower native to the Blessed Isles that opened for one night a year and lit the whole forest crimson, and if you pulled a petal the rest curled inward and the stem bent away like it was frightened. It's virtually extinct now. The surviving bushes are in a garden in Noxus (of all places).

They have a saying on the Isles: death is but a new beginning. Read it as comfort on Halloween if you want. In context it's a threat.

Related reading: the Harrowing skins worth owning, champions who never stayed dead, who survives a horror movie, and the Runeterra lore map.

Every ranking we've argued about is collected on the Top Ten Thursdays hub.

Happy Halloween.