This just struck me today, I'm a little shocked there's not a character who wields a World Rune yet

With the release of Zoe, there are now 139 champions in League of Legends. Every year Riot releases 10-12 new champions or reworks, all of which have the potential to be rewritten entirely from the ground up. The World Runes or Runes in general are a concept that have existed in League of Legends even before the lore was reworked, and after the lore was reworked we got even more hints at their importance, mostly through the bio of Ryze. Despite this fact, there isn't a single champion who uses World Runes in the game which is super surprising to me.

I can see a few arguments against them. They're too op, they'd have to lend themselves to crazy gameplay, they are supposed to be super elusive, Ryze is doing his job well, etc. Then again, we have champions like Bard and Aurelion Sol in the game who are literal gods as well as the Targonians, the Void, Death itself in the form of Kindred. A champion wielding a World Rune likely wouldn't be more powerful than at least some of those characters in the lore, and as well all know lore doesn't matter for balance so it's not like it would be completely out of the question. Ironically the closest wielder to a World Rune user we have is Ryze, and it's because he has passively absorbed some of their latent power over the thousands of years even though he himself is trying to remove them from the equation.

Perhaps the reason is simply that Riot isn't ready to reveal some of the most fantastical elements of the lore yet. World Runes are right up there with the Void, Bandle City, demons and the inner workings of the real Targonian world as far as crazy elements go. We know that World Runes create worlds but don't know how. Do they all need to be combined at once to create worlds? Are they all specialized ie the Rune of water, rock, fire, etc.? What are there origins? Did they create the demigods such as Ornn, or maybe even the universal gods like Aurelion who have been around from nothingness? There's a lot of room for them to be explored, and with them making a cameo appearance in Zoe's lore I wouldn't be surprised if Riot is gearing up to give us a little more information about the World Runes themselves or a character who uses them.

This begs the question of course, is there a champion already on the way? When Zoe's lore released I saw a lot of people speculating that the girl in the red dress Zoe described was a young Irelia, an Irelia that may have now picked up the World Rune since Zoe basically blew a hole straight to it. Perhaps it's a rune of steel, which is how Irelia has a telekinesis type ability over the blades and we have heard from Reav3's roadmap that she hits them with a thousand tiny cuts before going in, it sounds like Irelia will be even better at moving them after the rework.

Irelia aside, there's lots of cool concepts that could be done. In Ryze's lore a World Rune causes the ocean to come into the continent and wipe out a bunch of villages and cities, in game that could lead to some cool stuff. Perhaps a support who can alter terrain like Taliyah's original ult? Maybe the ability to create new pathways and block old ones around the map, it could be interesting. I'm just surprised we have so many champions and not one of them (that we know of) uses a Rune yet.