Minotaur

The minotaurs are a bovine race of great physical strength, marked by heavy horns and hulking builds. They are a distinct species rather than a Vastayan tribe, and a long diaspora has scattered them across Runeterra. The oldest minotaur communities were the clans of the Great Barrier mountains, who guarded the overland trade routes to the ancient city of Zaun for centuries and kept clear of Valoran's wider conflicts. They governed themselves through moot halls, and warriors such as Alistar urged their kin to forge stronger bonds with other mortal races. Prejudice hindered this, as many outsiders saw minotaurs as little more than beasts. Noxus shattered this way of life. The empire's emissary, the matriarch of House Tewain, called the mountain clans to parley and offered them a share of power in a coming conquest of the coastal city of Basilich. Many clans accepted, but Alistar's people sent him to refuse. Betrayed under truce by clans already sworn to Noxus, he killed Lady Tewain but was chained and hauled to the Noxian capital. There they were cast into the Reckoning arenas for a gladiatorial festival called the Fleshing, and when it ended twenty-one days later, Alistar was the only member of his tribe left alive. His later escape, aided by a servant girl named Ayelia, became a symbol of resistance to Noxian rule, and his suffering came to stand for the peoples crushed beneath the empire's expansion. Beyond the ruin of the mountain clans, minotaurs have been folded into the powers that displaced them. Some serve in the Noxian military, like Zalt, who marched with Darius's legions against the Winter's Claw. Others found a place in Demacia, where the minotaur Kriel fought among the Dauntless Vanguard's Shields and where minotaur builders raised the fortress in the Greenfang Mountains for King Argostan generations ago. Whether any free minotaur clans still hold the Great Barrier remains an open question.