Frostguard

The Frostguard are the most secretive of the three great tribes of the Freljord, an isolated order ruled by the immortal ice witch Lissandra from a hidden citadel above the Howling Abyss. To outsiders they present themselves as stoic keepers of Freljordian history and faith, preaching the words of the Three Sisters, but their true purpose lies buried beneath the ice. They guard the sealed prison of the Watchers, and Lissandra bends every action of the order toward keeping that ice frozen. They trace back to the age before mortal civilization, when the Three Sisters, Avarosa, Serylda, and Lissandra, ruled the Freljord. Lissandra alone heard the whispers of the Watchers, entities from beyond Runeterra who offered the power of True Ice in exchange for a gateway into the world. The pact turned the sisters into Iceborn and raised armies of troll kings and twisted Balestriders. When Avarosa and Serylda learned the Watchers meant to unmake all life, they marched on Lissandra's fortress, igniting the War of the Three Sisters. As the Watchers emerged, Lissandra betrayed her patrons, spending her own True Ice and the life force of her dying sisters to entomb them beneath what became the Howling Abyss. For thousands of years since, Lissandra has rebuilt the Frostguard into an order devoted to that single secret, rewriting history to erase the Watchers from memory and killing any who speak the forbidden legend aloud. Its inner circle, the Keepers Lodge, guards the deeping ways below the Frostguard Citadel, while Frost Priests carry shards of Dark Ice and mark the faithful with the Eye of Lissandra. Each year, on the vernal equinox, three chosen Iceborn descend into the Abyss itself, a duty so deadly that more than half the names on the lodge's roll of honor bear the rune of death. Outwardly the Frostguard hold themselves apart from the Freljord's other powers, the Avarosan and Sejuani's Winter's Claw, though Lissandra works through hidden machinations to shape the frozen north. She has courted alliance with the warmother Ashe while concealing her true aims, as a Demacian envoy learned upon slipping through the black-stone Frostguard city at night to find its people worshipping around a giant stone eye. The order's reach is brutal: when the Frostguard came for the young spirit walker Udyr, they slaughtered his entire tribe.