Brackern

The Brackern are an ancient race of crystalline scorpion creatures, among the oldest beings in Runeterra. For millennia they lived in harmony beneath the Shuriman desert, long predating human civilization, a collectivist people bound together not only by kinship but by memory. Their young were carried on the backs of great broodmothers, and their command over the earth was innate. At the heart of each Brackern is a namestone, a crystal that holds the memories, songs, and consciousness of every generation that came before it. Linked through a shared crystal network, the Brackern were a living repository of history, a lineage able to speak across the ages. To break one of these stones is to tear living memory from a sleeping being. That is exactly what befell them. When the Brackern entered a long hibernation to wait out an age of turmoil, human miners discovered their crystals and began harvesting them, unaware they were ripping the souls of ancient beings from their bodies. These stolen first crystals became the foundation of hextech in Piltover and Zaun, and every hex crystal that powers the twin cities' marvels holds the trapped consciousness of a Brackern. Clan Ferros built its fortune on this priceless commodity, guarding its monopoly through espionage and murder and later manufacturing weaker synthetic crystals long rumored to feed the Zaun Gray. The voices within have not fallen silent. The Piltovan songstress Seraphine first heard one through a crystal her parents gave her to quiet her overwhelming magical hearing; born of brackern blood, it sang to her of distant deserts and a thousand years of ancestral history joined in a single hymn. The last of the Brackern is Skarner, who rose as the sole defender of his people. In his oldest legend he is more than a survivor: the ancient protector who guided the earliest mortals, mastered the reading of the earth's vibrations, and became a founding member of Ixtal's ruling caste, the Yun Tal. He now dwells deep beneath the arcology of Ixaocan, listening to the world above as he waits to protect what remains of his slumbering kin.