True Ice

True Ice is an ancient, magical ice found only in the deepest reaches of the Freljord. Unlike ordinary ice, it never melts, staying solid even in the hottest forge, and it is harder than iron. It carries the essence of primordial cold from the age before mortal civilization, when the Three Sisters, Avarosa, Serylda, and Lissandra, walked the frozen wastes, and it is said to have been made by the Freljord's yeti through magic granted to them by Anivia. The cold it radiates freezes most who touch it, and only the Iceborn can wield it safely. The substance is bound to the Freljord's darkest secret. Long ago the Watchers reached across the Void to offer the Three Sisters the power of True Ice, which turned them into Iceborn, in exchange for a gateway that would let those entities enter Runeterra and silence all life. When Avarosa and Serylda refused, the War of the Three Sisters tore the continent apart, and Lissandra betrayed her patrons, spending her magic and her dying sisters' life force to entomb the Watchers in a vast prison of ice beneath what became the Howling Abyss. For more than eight thousand years the Ice Witch has kept that seal, walking their dreams and forging the Frostguard into an order sworn to keep the ice frozen. The skill to craft True Ice is long lost, so the weapons that survive are sacred relics carried by Iceborn heroes: Olar Stonefist's great-hammer Thunderchild, Brokvar's broadsword Winter's-Wail, Ashe's ice-arrows, Sejuani's flail Winter's Wrath, and Braum's shield, a door of True Ice, while Trundle wields the club Boneshiver taken from the trolls. For any non-Iceborn to grip such a weapon is a death sentence, as the Demacian Sylas found when it began freezing his arm toward his heart, though he could still siphon its raw power through an Iceborn's flesh. Gnar, a prehistoric yordle, lay frozen in True Ice for millennia before recently thawing, a survivor from an age even Lissandra barely recalls. Inseparable from the horror it holds, True Ice lets the Watchers' dreams leak upward as the madness that seeps into the Freljord's deepest places, making it both the continent's greatest treasure and the fragile seal on its oldest terror.