Semchul

Semchul is a semi-independent border village in the jungles of Ixtal, the reclusive land its people call the last of Runeterra. It sits far from the great capital of Ixaocan, deep enough into the wilds that even other Ixtali regard it as remote. Its households tend the living wall of vines that curls protectively around Ixtal and its people, and hunt the serpents, jaguars, and other beasts that move through the dark waters and undergrowth at its edges. To the villagers, this work is nothing less than the defense of the world. After the Final War, when the world boiled with monsters and death and Ixtal was pushed almost to extinction, the first of the Yun turned the Axiomata of Ixaocan into a weapon, quelling every foe and sealing the borders. Ixtal alone survived, sheltered beneath its canopies from the poison that consumed everything outside. The gardeners of Semchul count themselves among those who keep Ixtal from that same fate, treating the machines that cut into the jungle as an extension of the outside world's poison, miasma with metal legs. Semchul is the birthplace of Aliay Qunlan, child of a border-gardener father and a hunter mother, who were sure their offspring would grow into one trade or the other. Aliay chose neither, taking instead to the village's modest athenaeum and, in time, to study under the Yun Tal master Mivasim. For twenty-three years Aliay learned the Axiomata, wielding the elements through a windcord of translucent silk, before leaving the wilds of Semchul to walk the long road inward toward Ixaocan.