Many theories have been put forth to explain the origin of the elven peoples in Runeterra.
However, the true story—regrettably—involves a yordle by the name of Lulu, beginning in the enchanted glade where she had dwelled for centuries, on a day that was especially listless. Which, as far as magical forests go, does generally hint that something terribly important to the fate of the world is about to transpire.
Lulu was staring down into a dark pool, a grumpy expression strewn across her face.
"I'm bored," she grumbled.
Pix, the fairy, hovered upside-down beside her. "Me too."
"We should play a new game."
"Like what?"
"I don't know." They'd done practically everything could be done by that point, it felt like.
She watched her reflection in the pool, and sighed. There was no denying she was something of a freak of nature, objectively speaking, with her skin the color of a waterlogged violet. Dimensions best described as scrunched. The ludicrously oversized hat, the toy-costume robes. Eyes glowing faintly with patently irresponsible stores of magic. Altogether, it presented the unfortunate impression of some mutant abortion of nature frozen partway on the evolutionary scale between a squirrel and a blueberry, with a cliche and outdated fashion sense to boot. Not that there was much of a point in dressing up without anyone to impress.
Lulu frowned sympathetically at the creature in the water, at its pitiable ugliness. No one—save perhaps the most desperate of degenerates, and even then most likely under the influence of questionable herbs—would ever consider indulging in an act of courtship with it.
"Well," she said at last. "That's certainly one bit of revelry I am still yet to engage in."
Thinking on it further, there was an undeniable charm to humans. She considered that certain rugged appeal they brandished, that adorably undue confidence and curious proportions—broad shoulders, generous hips and musculatures, the mammary glands so often impractically inflated that they seemed borderline decorative. Full lips. Strong backsides built, one suspected, for entirely unnecessary dramatics…
"You are picking them apart like livestock," Pix interjected.
"I am describing them accurately."
"Earlier, what were you saying about a new game?"
The sorceress shrugged. "Oh, right." Truth be told, she herself wasn't entirely convinced by the idea she had only just invented. "I'm thinking," she said, slowly, as if to taste each word for texture, "I disguise myself as a she-human, one that is beautiful beyond measure. And I travel the land, moving from village to village, passing through every nation marked on the map and the lands between."
"A quest, it sounds like." Pix said, interested so far. "Only, to what end?"
"To mate." Lulu grinned. "With every he-human."
"Ah." Pix paused, as though to process. "Every he-human?" he asked. And, judging by his skeptical tone, if he had possessed eyebrows—let alone eyes or a face—one would certainly have been raised.
"Yup. Every he-human in the world."
"In existence?"
"Indeed."
"Well," Pix said after a moment, "it is certainly ambitious."
"But?" Lulu prompted.
"But he-humans are a jealous species. Things could become very messy very quickly. Imagine you charm a king… then have a go at his rival from the next nation over."
Lulu tilted her head, listening with amusement.
"That alone could start a war lasting decades," Pix finished.
"True enough," she admitted. "And that is merely one scenario among many." Sitting down, she plucked a dandelion from the moss, twirling it idly between her fingers. "Still," she mused, "consider the influence I might wield. The course of entire bloodlines and kingdoms swayed by my whims."
Pix hummed approvingly. "A delightfully devious notion. But will it really be that simple?"
"Humans are always striving for some measure of tidiness and consistency in their tediously dull lives," the sorceress continued, her voice all of a sudden beholden to a sharp bitterness that would have seemed alien to all but her closest companion. "All straight roads, straight troubles with straight solutions." She flicked a seed from the dandelion and watched it drift. "Nothing disrupts a semblance of order quite like a harlot."
"That has been historically consistent," Pix said, nodding. "The poor wretches. Birth. Love. War. Taxes. It's all the same pattern for the whole lot of them, unless some great calamity befalls. Which, even if they manage to endure, they still only die in the end. How tragic."
It was then that Lulu tapped a finger against her cheek.
"What should my new form look like?"
Pix righted himself in the air, fully at attention. "Now there's a fun consideration."
He circled her once, assessing the situation as only a fairy with centuries of poor impulse control could.
"You would need to be…enticing. A physique that suggests strong reproductive capabilities."
"Mhm, mhm!" She nodded cheerfully in agreement while already drawing the sigil for the spell in the air with one finger. "I believe the term is mature."
"Exotic, but not overly so. A feature or two that will grant you a one-of-a-kind mystique."
"Pointed ears, perhaps?" she suggested, tracing the rims of her own ears.
Pix bobbed his head in approval. "If you would allow yourself a single sharp edge, let it be that. But be soft in appearance otherwise; fragile-seeming almost."
"Only in appearance."
"Naturally. Men will want to hold you, protect you and coddle you, thinking that you are weak. But likewise they'll respect you, growing even more enamored, once they realize that you are fully capable of fending for yourself." He chuckled a bit. "You know your way with a sword, don't you? After that one prank we engineered—"
"I would be tall," Lulu went on excitedly. "Elegant! Fairer than fair!"
"Athletic and limber in form. Golden-haired."
"My lips will be luscious." She giggled. "Well suited for fireside smooching."
"Breaking so many hearts with your confidence..."
"...and I will do it while smiling."
Pix drifted back a cautious distance. "Is the spell ready to cast?"
Lulu was concentrating too intently to answer.
Holding the image they had formed in her mind of what she would become, the yordle traced the final linemark of the sigil with a deliberate flourish and with that there came no fireworks, no thunderclap, no amazing announcement of sorcery unleashed upon the world, no more than the quiet folding of magic inward, like the turning of a page, to signal what was to be the tremendous shifting of one chapter of her existence into the next.
At once her breath grew labored, drawn from her in wavering pitches that hovered uneasily between a groan and a gasp as the spell began its work, her fanlike ears shrinking and sharpening into elegant points, the azure pallor of her skin paling and softening as the faint bestial fur along her limbs withdrew into nothingness, bone and sinew stretching and reshaping beneath the surface while new curves were formed, her robe tearing audibly as her chest expanded, hips widening and spine lengthening, soft and yielding fat gathering in places where previously there had been none at all, a strange dual sensation of pain and pleasure mingling together until even she could not quite say which weighed heavier.
Pix hovered there, silent for once, watching with a mixture of fascination and mild professional concern.
He had seen Lulu reshape frogs into teapots and teapots into dragons. He had witnessed her reversing the gravity of an entire apple orchard, simply to observe where the fruits would fall when given the freedom. Once, and purely on a whim, she transmobulated a traveling merchant into a goose, proceeding then to sneak up and pluck a single feather from its backside each day, in a torment that altogether lasted nearly three weeks' time.
...but never before had she cast a transformation spell, let alone of this ilk in magnitude, upon herself.
The leaves in the enchanted glade rustled with unease as Pix was stirring with worry but maintaining his distance, whispering encouragement that the once-yordle did not hear, while her entire body was convulsing beneath the spell's relentless architecture, the stout compactness of her frame stretching upward and outward at a glacial pace, bones lengthening and sinews tightening, her center of gravity climbing as unfamiliar height claimed her inch by inch, her hair bursting forth in a cascade of molten gold spilling down her back like sunlight torn loose from the sky, her fingers unfurling and like roots forcing their way through the damp topsoil as she floundered to her knees, her joints unhitching with delicate precision as fresh muscle coiled beneath newly christened skin, the tenor of her voice deepening as her breath was fracturing into gasping half-pleasurable-half-pained sounds, the transformation rippling through her torso where absence once ruled and abundance now took violent hold and the fabric of her robe was tearing in surrender afore this swelling tide of flesh that was blooming from her chest to assert her newfound womanhood with unapologetic ambition, the spell sculpting and resculpting with near-indulgent fascination, much the same ongoing in this manner everywhere else that was a parcel of her personage, hips and thighs widening and spine straightening, ribs expanding, proportions recalibrating beyond any modest expectation—
—and still, the work of the magic was not complete.
A heat was pooling low in her newly forming center, where instincts she had never known to have possessed before flickered awake and inflamed like a bear roused from its den mid-winter.
Pix gave a low whistle. "Ambitious indeed."
The magic was moving, a thing with its own will.
It was turning the pages of the yordle's being without any pause for civility.
Lulu thought, it may be perhaps her entire life was prelude to this. So long wielding magic to sow disorder, twisting the fundamental laws of reality, turning innocent men into livestock for her fleeting amusement. Empires rising and falling and becoming swallowed by ivy. She had laughed at countless wars and near-world-ending catastrophes, and lived long enough in their wake to forget many of their descriptions. Nothing amazed her, nothing held import. The world, for all its intrinsic chaos, had grown woefully predictable.
And yet this—this was new.
This was a risk, inhabiting a body that could be touched. Bruised. Wanted.
Why had she not thought of it sooner?
A laugh trembled in her newly reforming throat.
How curious, she thought.
After all these centuries of undying—
I may have only just begun the long walk of my life.