Vekaura

Vekaura is a ruined city in southern Shurima, half buried in the sand creeping out from the Sai. In the days of the ancient empire it was a place of real splendor, for Azir's mother was born here, and the young emperor was lavish in his gifts to its people. Stepped gardens and flowers gathered from every corner of the empire garlanded its structures, its towers gleamed with silver and jade, and cool water flowed from the great temple at its heart along grand aqueducts, built in the belief that the bounty would never end. The city's craftsmanship matched its wealth. Its gateway was raised by exiled craftsmen from lost Icathia, each stone cut and fitted with such precision that no mortar was needed to hold it in place. Nasus remembers entering Vekaura in triumph beside his brother at the head of ten thousand gold-armored soldiers, and he remembers that within a year of that march the empire was gone. The millennia that followed wore the city down to an exposed skeleton of stone. Vekaura did not stay empty. Over the last few centuries, people who clung to the old ways built upon the ruins, believing their future might be saved by revering the past, patching the ancient walls with sun-baked bricks painted to match the original blocks. Outsiders dismissed the result as a tribal camp and a meeting place for weary travelers and nomads, but after Shurima's rebirth the city itself was reborn. Its souk filled with color and noise, and tribes such as the Barbae, Zagayah, and Yesheje, once sworn enemies, walked its crowded streets side by side. The reborn city became the stage for a struggle over Azir's legacy. Guided by words scrawled in blood on the walls of the Astrologer's Tower, Nasus came to Vekaura because he sensed one of the Ascended Bloodline there, blood potent enough to have restored Azir from oblivion and, in the wrong hands, to doom the reborn Shurima. In Vekaura, Sivir, the unknowing carrier of that royal bloodline, crossed paths with the freed magus Xerath, who sought to end Azir's line for good. With the help of Nasus and the young stoneweaver Taliyah, she survived.