Amakra

Amakra is a Shuriman city on the eastern edge of the Great Sai, standing on the banks of the Mother of Life where the great river runs between Shurima City and Vekaura. It was a lively place of bazaars and street performers, where fortune-tellers read auguries in the gutters and acrobats dazzled the crowds. Two of the desert's most feared figures, the prophet Malzahar and the mercenary Samira, were both born on its streets. Malzahar was the only son of aging trinket peddlers of Amakra. When a wasting sickness took his parents, the traumatized boy was left to fend for himself, reading fortunes in the gutter for a coin or scraps of bread. As his auguries proved more and more accurate, his reputation spread from cameleers in dirty sandals to patrons in jeweled slippers at the bazaar. Disillusioned by the endless cycle of suffering he foresaw, he gave up his possessions and left Amakra for good, wandering the wastes until he reached lost Icathia, where the Void answered him. Samira and her parents lived as street performers in Amakra, thrilling onlookers even as they worried for their daughter. On the eve of her fourteenth birthday, armed strangers swarmed the city, invoking the name of an ancient magus as they seized and slew its people. Hidden in the rafters of her home, Samira watched, and came to hate her own helplessness. The followers of Xerath destroyed Amakra while their master still lay imprisoned in the Tomb of the Emperors, and the survivors, Samira's family among them, escaped to the Noxian port of Bel'zhun. She would carry the fire of that fallen homeland into a Noxian warband and a new life. Years later, preaching to his cultists as the Prophet of the Void, Malzahar would still name Amakra as the place where he watched his parents waste away, memories he claimed the Void itself had tasted and hungered to consume.