The Great Sai

The Great Sai is the vast desert that dominates the heart of the Shuriman continent. Its barren, sun-scorched expanse is the legacy of ancient catastrophe: when the magus Xerath betrayed the emperor Azir during his Ascension ceremony, the capital city was destroyed and the life-giving Sun Disc was lost, and the land has been a wasteland of shifting sands and desperate raiders ever since. Its most powerful inhabitants remain consumed by grudges older than memory, and travelers cross it only with merchant caravans and a great deal of water. Life clings to the desert's edges and oases. On its eastern rim stands Amakra, where Samira and her family performed in the streets until armed strangers swarmed the city in the name of an ancient magus and put many of its people to the sword, driving the survivors to the Noxian port of Bel'zhun. Its caravanserais and tribes raised children like the sisters Marjen and Hara, who learned to sand-dance across the burning ground. Kassadin first walked these sands as an offcast hired to draw predators away from caravan goods, before becoming a guide so trusted that the traders named him for the old question of whom the desert knows. Veins of solid bedrock run beneath the Sai, and the Sai Kahleek that cuts across it is the hunting ground of the xer'sai, whose dunebreakers are strong enough to shatter that stone and open new lands to the swarm. Yet the desert's buried tombs hold the riches and relics of the fallen empire, guarded by curses and monsters. Marauding tribes such as the Kthaons prey on the vulnerable; Sivir was orphaned by them and survived by looting half-buried ruins. Ezreal crossed the Great Sai with caravans heading south to find the lost tomb of Ne'Zuk, where he claimed a bronze gauntlet of terrible ancient power, and it was from another such tomb that Amumu rose. Far beyond the harsh sands lie savanna plains, mountain steppes, and the great jungles along the border of Ixtal and Shurima. At the desert's heart, the ruined capital that all had long avoided has begun to stir again, its waters returning and its walls rising from the sand as the scattered tribes of Shurima gather back toward the seat of their vanished empire.