Dota 2 Heroes Stories
Dota 2 Hero Lore Part III
Page "C"
15. Centaur Warrunner
It's said that a centaur's road is paved with the corpses of the fallen. For the one called Warrunner, it has been a long road indeed. To outsiders, the four-legged clans of Druud are often mistaken for simple, brutish creatures. Their language has no written form; their culture lacks pictographic traditions, structured music, formalized religion. For centaurs, combat is the perfect articulation of thought, the highest expression of self. If killing is an art among centaurs, then Bradwarden the Warrunner is their greatest artist. He rose to dominance on the proving grounds of Omexe, an ancient arena where centaur clans have for millennia gathered to perform their gladiatorial rites. As his fame spread, spectators came from far and wide to see the great centaur in action. Always the first to step into the arena, and the last to leave, he composes a masterpiece in each guttering spray, each thrust of blood-slickened blade-length. It is the poetry of blood on steel, flung in
complex patterns across the pale sands of the killing floor.
Warrunner defeated warrior after warrior, until the arena boomed with the cheering of his name, and he found himself alone, the uncontested champion of his kind. The great belt of Omexe was bestowed, wrapped around his broad torso, but in his victory, the death-artist found only emptiness. For what is a warrior without a challenge? The great centaur galloped out of Omexe that day with a new goal. To his people, Warrunner is the greatest warrior to ever step into the arena. Now he has set out to prove he is the greatest fighter who has ever lived.
16. Chaos Knight
The veteran of countless battles on a thousand worlds, Chaos Knight hails from a far upstream plane where the fundamental laws of the universe have found sentient expression. Of all the ancient Fundamentals, he is the oldest and most tireless, endlessly searching out a being he knows only as "The Light." Long ago the Light ventured out from the progenitor realm, in defiance of the first covenant. Now Chaos Knight shifts from plane to plane, always on the hunt to extinguish the Light wherever he finds it. A thousand times he has snuffed out the source, and always he slides into another plane to continue his search anew.
Upon his steed Armageddon he rides, wading into battle with maniacal frenzy, drawing strength from the disorder of the universe. A physical manifestation of chaos itself, in times of need he calls upon other versions of himself from other planes, and together these dark horsemen ride into battle, as unstoppable as any force of nature. Only when the last Light of the world is scoured from existence will the search be ended. Where rides the Chaos Knight, death soon follows.
17. Chen
Born in the godless Hazhadal Barrens, Chen came of age among the outlaw tribes who eked out an existence in the shimmering heat of the desert. Using an ancient form of animal enthrallment, Chen's people husbanded the hardy desert locuthi, a stunted species of burrowing dragon that melted desert sands into tubes of glass where twice-a-year rains collected. Always on the edge of starvation and thirst, fighting amongst their neighbors and each other, Chen's clan made the mistake, one fateful day, of ambushing the wrong caravan.
In the vicious battle that followed, Chen's clan was outmatched. The armored Knights of the Fold made short work of the enthralled locuthi, who attacked and died in waves. With their dragons dead, the tribesmen followed. Chen struggled, and slashed, and clawed, and perished—or would have. Defeated, on his knees, he faced his execution with humility, offering his neck to the blade. Moved by Chen's obvious courage, the executioner halted his sword. Instead of the blade, Chen was given a choice: death or conversion. Chen took to the faith with a ferocity. He joined the Fold and earned his armor one bloody conversion at a time. Now, with the fanaticism of a convert, and with his powers of animal enthrallment at their peak, he seeks out unbelievers and introduces them to their final reward.
18. Clinkz
At the base of the Bleeding Hills stretches a thousand-league wood, a place called The Hoven, where black pools gather the tarry blood of the uplands, and the king-mage Sutherex sits in benevolent rule. Once a sworn protector of the Hoven lands, Clinkz earned a reputation for his skill with a bow. In the three-hundredth year of the king-mage, the demon Maraxiform rose from sixth hell to lay claim to the forest. In response, the king-mage decreed an unbreakable spell: to any who slew the demon would be granted Life Without End.
Unaware of the spell, Clinkz waded into battle, defending his lands against the demon's fiery onslaught. Clinkz drove Maraxiform back to the gates of sixth-hell itself, where on that fiery threshold the two locked in a mortal conflict. Grievously wounded, the demon let out a blast of hellfire as Clinkz loosed his final arrow. The arrow struck the demon true as hellfire poured out across the land, lighting the black pools and burning Clinkz alive at the instant of the demon's death. Thus, the mage's spell took effect at the very moment of the archer's conflagration, preserving him in this unholy state, leaving him a being of bones and rage, caught in the very act of dying, carrying hell's breath with him on his journey into eternity.
19. Clockwerk
Rattletrap descends from the same far-flung kindred as Sniper and Tinker, and like many of the Keen Folk, has offset his diminutive stature through the application of gadgetry and wit. The son of the son of a clockmaker, Rattletrap was many years apprenticed to that trade before war rode down from the mountains and swept the plains villages free of such innocent vocations. "Your new trade is battle," his dying father told him as the village of their ancestors lay in charred and smoking ruins.
It is a poor tradesman who blames his tools, and Rattletrap was never one to make excuses. After burying his father among the ruins of their village, he set about to transform himself into the greatest tool of warfare that any world had ever seen. He vowed to never again be caught unprepared, instead using his talents to assemble a suit of powered Clockwerk armor to make the knights of other lands look like tin cans by comparison. Now Rattletrap is alive with devices, a small but deadly warrior whose skills at ambush and destruction have risen to near-automated levels of efficiency. An artisan of death, his mechanizations make short work of the unwary, heralding a new dawn in this age of warfare. What time is it? It's Clockwerk time!
20. Crystal Maiden
Born in a temperate realm, raised with her fiery older sister Lina, Rylai the Crystal Maiden soon found that her innate elemental affinity to ice created trouble for all those around her. Wellsprings and mountain rivers froze in moments if she stopped to rest nearby; ripening crops were bitten by frost, and fruiting orchards turned to mazes of ice and came crashing down, spoiled. When their exasperated parents packed Lina off to the equator, Rylai found herself banished to the cold northern realm of Icewrack, where she was taken in by an Ice Wizard who had carved himself a hermitage at the crown of the Blueheart Glacier. After long study, the wizard pronounced her ready for solitary practice and left her to take his place, descending into the glacier to hibernate for a thousand years. Her mastery of the Frozen Arts has only deepened since that time, and now her skills are unmatched.
