“None of us are ever truly alone…” The words hang in the air, a hollow echo from a voice that has not known warmth in millennia. Amumu, the Sad Mummy, shuffles through the sun-scorched dunes of Shurima, his bandages frayed and sand-caked. The wind carries the whispers of the dead, a chorus that has long been his only company. His large, hollow eyes stare ahead, unblinking, as memories of a life—or perhaps a death—he can barely recall flicker in the darkness behind his gaze.
Long before the League of Legends, before the summoners bound his essence to the Rift, Amumu was a child. A Yordle, small and curious, born under the golden gaze of Shurima’s twin suns. He lived in the shadow of the Tomb of the Emperors, where his people served the Ascended as caretakers and crypt-keepers. The tombs were sacred, their walls etched with spells to bind the restless dead. But Amumu was different. Where others saw duty, he saw mystery. He would sneak into the burial chambers, his tiny hands tracing the hieroglyphs that told of gods and monsters.
The priests warned him of the curses that lingered in the tombs. “The dead do not sleep,” they said. “They hunger.” But Amumu did not listen. One fateful night, during the Festival of the Sun Disc, he slipped into the forbidden vaults. There, he found a sarcophagus adorned with obsidian runes—a relic of the Darkin wars. The air hummed with malice. When Amumu touched the coffin, the seal broke.
What emerged was not a corpse, but a presence—a shard of the Void, older than Shurima itself. It coiled around him, cold and suffocating, and in that moment, Amumu ceased to be a child. His body withered, his skin hardening into brittle parchment. Bandages wrapped around him, not to heal, but to bind. The Void’s curse fused with his soul, twisting his innocence into something tragic and eternal.
The villagers cast him out, fearing the abomination he had become. “A curse walks among us!” they cried. Amumu fled into the desert, where the sun’s wrath burned his fragile form. He wandered for years, a specter in a land of the living. Those who saw him felt an inexplicable sorrow, a grief that clung like dust. They recoiled, not from fear, but from the crushing weight of his loneliness.
The curse was cruel in its irony: Amumu could never be alone. His mere presence summoned spirits—shades of the dead, fragments of the Void—that swirled around him like a macabre halo. Yet no living soul could bear to stay near him. They would approach, drawn by his melancholy, only to be consumed by despair. Amumu learned to avoid villages, hiding in ruins and forgotten crypts.
Centuries later, the League of Legends offered him a twisted solace. Here, he was not an outcast but a champion, his curse a weapon. He fought alongside—and against—others who understood isolation. Nasus, the Curator of the Sands, pitied him. “You carry a burden even I cannot comprehend,” the jackal-headed guardian rumbled. Amumu said nothing. What words could he offer?
In the Shadow Isles, he encountered Karthus, the Deathsinger, whose dirges harmonized with Amumu’s own sorrow. “Death is not the end,” Karthus crooned. “It is a symphony.” Amumu wondered if the lich knew that for him, death was the end—of hope, of connection, of peace.
His most haunting encounter was with Yorick, the Shepherd of Souls. The grave-digger studied him, his eyes gleaming with morbid fascination. “You are not alive, yet you are not dead,” Yorick mused. *”What *are* you?”* Amumu’s reply was a whisper: “A mistake.”
But it was in the Placidium of Ionia that Amumu’s curse reached its cruelest crescendo. During a battle against the Noxian invasion, he met a girl—a child with fiery hair and a stuffed bear named Tibbers. Annie. She smiled at him, unafraid, and for a heartbeat, Amumu dared to hope. “You’re like my friend!” she chirped, reaching for him. But as her hand brushed his bandages, the Void within him surged. Shadows erupted, swallowing her light. Annie stumbled back, her eyes filling with tears. “You’re scary,” she whimpered.
Amumu fled, his heart—a dried husk within his chest—cracking.
Now, he wanders the Rift, a relic of a forgotten age. His bandages unravel with every step, only to reknit themselves, endless and futile. The summoners command him to fight, but Amumu no longer cares for victory or defeat. He fights because it is easier than stopping, easier than thinking.
In the quiet moments, he visits the Tomb of the Emperors. The priests are long gone, their bones buried beneath the sand. He sits in the chamber where it began, staring at the empty sarcophagus. The hieroglyphs still tell their story: “Beware the hunger that cannot be fed.”
“None of us are ever truly alone,” he repeats, his voice a dry rasp. The spirits swirl around him, their whispers a cacophony of shared despair.
But Amumu knows the truth.
He is alone.
He will always be alone.
The desert wind howls, carrying the scent of ozone and decay. Amumu trudges through the ruins of a Shuriman city, its towers crumbling like ancient bones. The sky churns with storm clouds, a rarity in this land of endless sun. He feels the storm’s approach—a flicker of kinship. Both are anomalies, both unwelcome.
In the distance, a figure approaches. A warrior, clad in gold and crimson. Azir, the Ascended Emperor. The man who once sealed the Void. Azir’s spear gleams, its tip forged from the Sun Disc itself. “Child of Shurima,” the emperor intones, “your suffering ends today.”
Amumu tilts his head, a gesture both childlike and grotesque. “You cannot kill what is already dead,” he says.
Azir’s eyes narrow. “Then I will free you.”
The battle is swift. Azir’s magic scours the earth, sand erupting into pillars of flame. Amumu staggers, his bandages smoldering, but he does not fall. The Void within him laughs, a sound like grinding stone. When Azir’s spear pierces his chest, Amumu feels nothing—not pain, not fear. Only a fleeting gratitude.
But the curse holds.
Azir stares at him, frustrated. “Why do you cling to this existence?”
Amumu’s voice is barely a breath. “Because I do not know how to let go.”
The emperor leaves him there, half-buried in the sand.
In the Shadow Isles, Amumu finds a kinship with Hecarim, the Shadow of War. The centaur’s hooves thunder across the spectral plains, and for a time, they ride together—a parade of the damned. Hecarim speaks of conquest, of vengeance, but Amumu hears only the loneliness beneath the boasts.
Even the dead, it seems, are not immune to despair.
On the Howling Abyss, Amumu’s tears freeze into crystals that shatter like glass. The wind carries the screams of the fallen, and he wonders if any of them understand. They rage, they weep, they cling to their hatred.
He does not.
He simply is.
A relic.
A reminder.
A wound that will not heal.
“None of us are ever truly alone,” he whispers to the void.
But the void does not answer.
It never does.