The Story of Xerath
Xerath was born into slavery in ancient Shurima — a child of no family and no rights, who survived by the intelligence that the empire he served had decided was worth nothing from someone born in his caste. Azir found him, saw the intelligence, and did something that Shurima's traditions did not require: he freed him, gave him an education, made him his closest advisor. Xerath was grateful. He was also, as the years passed, increasingly certain that the injustice of his birth was the representative case for an entire system that deserved destruction.
When Azir attempted to Ascend — to transform himself into a god-warrior through the sun disc — Xerath acted. He sabotaged the ritual, redirecting the Ascension energy toward himself. He became a being of pure arcane energy, unbound from the physical flesh that had defined his caste, more powerful than any Ascended before him. And Shurima fell — the civilization that had enslaved him, that Azir had built on its bones, collapsed into the desert.
He was imprisoned for three thousand years. He is free now, and his agenda has not simplified with time: he wants power, yes, but he wants it in service of a fundamental transformation of the world order that assigned him his birth station. Whether this agenda has remained coherent after three millennia of magical imprisonment, or whether the man who felt the injustice has been replaced by something that just wants to burn, is a question Shurima is trying to answer before he finishes answering it himself.