In the new Pantheon lore, it says that the Aspect of War somehow got killed by Aatrox. How is this possible? Arent aspects immortal? Asol threw a fucking star at Pantheon and it just killed the body and not the Aspect but he died from Aatrox's stabby stabby? Or is he still alive and was like fuck runeterra I'm out.
Sadly we have no idea if it is dead and what that means.
well it's the celestial concept. I always thought the aspects were simply the personifications of the concept, not the concept itself
The Aspects are concepts incarnate, but immortality isn't exactly as clear cut in Runeterra as you might expect. When Aurelion Sol obliterated Pantheon of a bygone era, the assumption is that he annihilated the body Pantheon was using, but didn't touch the Aspect itself. Aatrox's sword isn't like that, it's described as a god-killing weapon and considering he was once an Ascended, his powers at their core stem from a similar origin to Pantheon.
The ultimate fate of Pantheon isn't really known, and we'll probably need to wait on that potential Pantheon vs Aatrox story to find out more, but for all intents and purposes, based on what the bio tells us, Aatrox killed the very concept of war, which Atreus then reignited by taking up the mantle of War through sheer force of will.
So, we kind of have a problem with the aspect being dead dead.
If it were totally dead, the concept of war would die with it. (Yes, they're mortal. But it takes cosmic warfare to kill a concept...)
But war itself did not die, so my current thinking is that the aspect itself was effectively knocked out by taking Aatrox's blow for its host (Atreus of course) and keeping Atreus alive. Pantheon, once a hostile aspect that preferred near-total control over its hosts, is now being reshaped by Atreus, perhaps into a more symbiotic concept.
Sharjo's theory is a similar possibility, though.
I miss the days when Targon was just a normal Greek village with a couple of warriors blessed by a God.
