The Story of Malphite
Malphite is a fragment of the Marble Citadel — an ancient magical construct or entity, depending on how you classify something that is made of stone and is also alive — that was shattered in events that predate the current age of Runeterra. He is what remains: a massive, sentient rock of roughly humanoid configuration, carrying the memory of being part of something larger and the purpose of reassembling it, or protecting what cannot be reassembled, or simply existing in the absence of the whole that would give him context.
He is slow in the way mountains are slow — not unintelligent, but operating on a timescale that differs from organic life. He has strong opinions about order and chaos, which makes sense for something that is itself a fragment of a shattered order. He finds chaos irritating not from temperament but from philosophical conviction: things that shatter cannot be rebuilt the same way, and the shattering of things is therefore a specific kind of permanent loss that he has reason to understand intimately.
He fights when fighting is necessary, which in Ixtal's contested jungle regions is more often than he would prefer. His method is direct: he is very large and very hard and he applies these attributes to problems in the most efficient way available. He is connected to Ixtal's elemental magic — the earth axiom particularly — in ways that make him simultaneously native to its landscape and something that predates it. He is old enough to be ambiguous about most categories.