Noxus in LoL: 10 Things the Lore Says About the Empire

The empire everyone calls evil will give you a job.

Ten things the lore actually says about Noxus, including who the third ruler is and why nobody knows.

Noxus in LoL

10 Things the Lore Says About the Empire

Lore

The empire everyone calls evil will give you a job.

Ten things the lore actually says about Noxus, including who the third ruler is and why nobody knows.

Noxus is the villain nation by reputation, and the reputation is doing a lot of work. Read the source material and it's stranger than that, and in a few places it's more generous than anywhere else on the map.

#10: It's named after a tribe that survived by hiding

Before there was an empire there were the Noxii, fractured barbarian tribes on the eastern coastal cliffs. When the Rune Wars tore the continent apart, they didn't win anything. They sheltered inside a fortress that was still standing and waited it out.

They came out to find the city surrounded by enemies, and the whole conquering-empire era started as a response to that.

#9: Anyone can rise, and that isn't propaganda

Noxus judges strength, and it counts a lot of things as strength. Politics, craft, trade and magic all qualify, and so does swinging something heavy. Background, homeland and wealth are supposed to be irrelevant.

Darius is the case study the lore keeps pointing at. He started with nothing and ended up one of the three most powerful people in the empire (Might, on the Trifarix).

Demacia, for contrast, will lock you up for being born wrong.

#8: The offer they make conquered cities is real

Swear loyalty and you get judged on your worth like everyone else. Refuse and you're destroyed. The wiki is blunt that this isn't a trick or a softening-up tactic, and, to be fair to Noxus, plenty of conquered people ended up better off.

That's the uncomfortable part of the whole nation. It's cruel on a schedule, and then it keeps its word.

#7: They brick up every road into a city they take

The moment a city falls, or surrenders, the warmasons start building Noxtoraa: huge arches of dark stone quarried from the mountains around the capital, raised over every road leading in. They're not fortifications. They're a sentence, aimed at anyone walking underneath.

#6: The invasion starts with two people taking notes

Warmasons (the same people who raise the Noxtoraa) are engineers, and they go in first, usually undercover. They map the ground, work out the routes an army could actually use, make friends, and find out what a place is bad at.

By the time you can see a Noxian legion, the survey has been done for months.

#5: The army is mostly made of people it conquered

Noxian warbands are raised out of subjugated territory and keep their own chieftains, their own hierarchy and their own way of fighting. One warband serves as shock troops because that's what they were already good at. Another scouts, another rides.

Nobody sands them down into a standard soldier. They get slotted into a warhost as the thing they already are, which is why "the Noxian army" doesn't have one look.

#4: An ordinary house is built to be defended

Noxian cities run to steep sloped walls, claustrophobic streets and crenellated roofs that overhang the floor below so you can shoot down through them. That applies to normal homes as well as keeps.

Taking a Noxian city by force means fighting for it street by street and then building by building. Ornn, who's hard to impress, allows that the granite is a respectable choice.

#3: One of the three rulers has no name

Swain replaced one-emperor rule with the Trifarix, a council of three holding Might, Vision and Guile, on the theory that any one person can go mad or corrupt but two others can always outvote them (two votes to one).

Might is Darius. Vision is Swain. Guile is the Faceless, and the identity is officially unknown, deliberately, because a ruler nobody can point to is a ruler nobody can plan around.

#2: A secret order has owned it since before it was a country

LeBlanc and Vladimir were there for the founding. They're still here. The Black Rose has spent that entire span quietly taking hold of the nobility, chunks of the military and, at one point, the Grand General on the throne.

Several of the empire's most famous campaigns were their idea. Somehow, most Noxians have no idea the organization exists.

#1: The capital is somebody's cell

The Immortal Bastion wasn't built by Noxus. Mordekaiser raised it as the seat of his own conquest of Valoran, and it held the arcane secrets he'd collected on the way.

LeBlanc and Vladimir (the Black Rose pair from #2) sealed him inside it and took his magic. The Noxii then walked in and made the place their capital without knowing what was in the foundations.

His power still stirs down there. The empire has been governing out of the lid of a jar for its entire history.

Conclusions

The thing that makes Noxus work as a faction is that its worst quality and its best one are the same quality. It will take everything from you and then genuinely not care where you came from. Every other nation on the map cares.

It also produces stories nobody else can. Sion, a hundred years ago, was left surrounded outside Hvardis because his own side wouldn't come out of the gate, and he spent the last of himself getting a hand around a Demacian king's throat. Noxus took his body home and built him a monument. Then it dug him back up.

Related reading: who in Runeterra could still level the place, the bleakest backstories in the game, and the Runeterra lore map for where all of this sits.

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