Pallas

Pallas is a coastal village in the northern reaches of Galrin, one of the islands of Ionia, the region once known as the First Lands. It sits below a mountain temple, and it is that temple, along with the lightless well sunk deep beneath it, that gives Pallas its place in history. For more than a thousand years, that well served as the prison of the Darkin Varus. Varus was carried to the First Lands bound within his own crystalline bow, wielded in the final days of the war against the Darkin by a golden-armored warrior queen of Valoran. Already made monstrous by the bow's power, her last act was to command her followers to bury her alive in the well beneath the temple overlooking Pallas, sealing the imprisoned Darkin in the dark with her. Curiously, no record of these events survives in any monastery in Ionia. For centuries the imprisoned Darkin was tended by the ritual ministrations of the temple's shrine maidens, while the bow itself remained hidden, untouched, and all but forgotten. That long quiet ended when Noxian invaders attacked the First Lands. Two beast hunters, Valmar and his heartlight Kai, met the first wave at the Temple of Pallas and drove the attackers off, but Kai was mortally wounded in the fighting. Grief-stricken, Val carried Kai inside, believing the well's forbidden magic could restore him. Instead the temple held only damnation. Both hunters were consumed by the Darkin power unleashed within it, their bodies unraveled and bound together again into a single new form fit to free Varus. What rose from the well was a gestalt of human and Darkin, and after more than a thousand years the reborn Darkin walked once more. The temple and its well endure at Pallas, the site of the one catastrophe that defines the village's long history.