TL;DR: It seems Xerath must have been exaggerating the whole "any slave who thinks about freedom will be killed" thing: (1) because slaves are really expensive (2) because Nasus isn't that much of a dick, right? (3) because it's stupidly excessive. Also, I'm ambivalent about the new "political" Xerath. I kind of liked him as a fanatic but strangely "pure-hearted" mage. Like an eccentric mathematician, if math actually gave you magical powers. I'm looking at this glowing blue Archon dude, and I just can't see him going around lobbying for a higher minimum wage. So it feels awkward to give Mr. POWER OVERWHELMING a Robin Hood backstory as a crusader for the common Magus.

This part really struck me as kind of bizarre:

And for this sin, Xerath had been punished with a horrible, maddening promise: Freedom. Unobtainable. Forbidden. Should the thought even dart through a slave’s mind, it would be punished by death, as the Ascended could gaze past flesh and bone, deep into one’s very soul, to see its dim traitorous glow. And yet, there it was, spoken by the young princeling he dragged from the embrace of the mercurial mother-desert. Azir, the Golden Sun, vowed that he would free his savior and new friend.

It's all very dramatic, in that "thoughtcrime does not entail death: thoughtcrime is death" sort of way. I honestly hadn't really thought much of it the first time I read his lore. But as I try to actually piece together an image of ancient Shurima, I find it really strange.

Straight reading

The straight reading is, IMO, pretty bonkers, to the point that I have a feeling it's not what Riot intended. Read straight, this bit from Xerath implies that Nasus and Renekton would every now and then be like, "Hey, that slave over there, he's thinking of being free." and kill them on the spot. This is like Loki levels of brutality.

No, not that Loki, you damn kids. Get off my lawn and go watch Dogma. That Loki.

http://www.imfdb.org/images/thumb/4/44/Dogma_Deagle.jpg/500px-Dogma_Deagle.jpg You didn't say "God bless you" when I sneezed.

I get that Nasus isn't "nice", but the idea of Nasus striking people dead because he looked at them and saw them "think about being free" seems pretty excessive. Isn't he at least kind of benevolent? He seems to be concerned with what's right. And to have some sensitivity, however abstract or detached, for the suffering of mortals.

"The tragic fall of Shurima was nothing compared to the tragedy of its rise from the grave." "The tragic fall of Shurima wasn't tragic, because screw these guys. And its rise from the grave? FINALLY. I've been moping around Valoran for MILLENNIA having to stare at mortals with a repulsive desire for FREEDOM. Renekton, my brother, we must CLEANSE this SICKNESS."

And it's weird to me not just for "moral" reasons: although I can see debate either way, I personally would find it kind of weird to imagine Ascended wandering around being Shuriman cops. I thought they were supposed to be dangerously powerful beings only called upon in times of great strife. If Nasus is keeping any part of his "Curator" story, you'd think he'd be off in some great library, controlling the flow of arcane knowledge and contemplating the universe. He might be respectful toward Azir, but you'd think that Azir would have better sense than to order a demigod to "go read my slave's mind and see if he likes me or not". It seems like the only proper way for that scene to end is a very stern talking to in a badass Nasus voice. Something about presuming to command powers beyond mortal comprehension, or the arrogance of believing that his mere wishes were of any concern to the cosmic forces with which Nasus communed. I mean, really, it seems like an Emperor so obsessed with loyalty as to want thought-screenings of the populace would be put down as a dangerous lunatic who'd sooner or later steer Shurima into disaster.

Further, while I think we can assume that Azir isn't going around ordering the execution of slaves who think however fleetingly of being free, presumably his predecessors weren't like that. You can mumble something about the grand scheme of the cosmos, or the inhumanity of the Ascended, and I guess I could see that version of Nasus, but I don't know, it feels deeply inconsistent with Nasus' character to imagine him going around slaughtering people for thinking things that upset the Emperor.

While such an analysis is arguably unfair and inappropriate when talking about League lore, surely it bears mention that this would be totally batshit crazy by any RL historical standard. There have been many variants of "slavery" in our own history, and we use the English word "slave" to describe many rather different arrangements. In America's history, you had the exceptionally brutal and vicious form in the southern states, which was often comparable to being in a lifelong prison gang. Even there, the idea of slaughtering slaves for thinking about freedom would be unimaginably awful. Ancient times aren't really of much help, either. Sure, I have a feeling that a Roman patriarch had the authority to kill a "slave"; they had the authority to have their own children killed. But if a slave ran off, they brought the slave back, and perhaps branded them. While we probably will never know too much about the "common" treatment of slaves in various periods of Rome's history, the consensus seems to be that they were not being killed capriciously for their thoughts; they were more like, well, a permanent underclass. At any rate, using the English word "slave" to refer to a person the Romans would have called a "servus" risks blurring together two rather different institutions. Same deal with English serfdom.

Setting aside any concept of basic humanity, and even pushing inhumanity to its extreme to imagine an ice-cold economic analysis that's probably quite unrealistic in its own way, slaves are freaking expensive. Nowadays, that's mostly thrown in for shock value, as a "kick the dog" or perhaps "we have reserves" moment, having a slave-owner express outrage at the death of a slave, not because a human being was killed, but because "a slave costs a lot of money!" And, of course, that's a really sick perspective. But even if they were also motivated by a basic sense of decency, I think it's accurate to say that slave-owners would be very upset at the loss of a slave just as a financial loss. Think about an employee, even a low-paid one. He or she might cost you $30,000 per year, all considered. Now imagine that you get their labor for the rest of their life, for only the cost of food and lodging. How much is that worth, even in a purely monetary sense? Let's say they work for 40 years. That's over a million dollars. If someone kills your slave, they've just stolen a million dollars from you. "Ah, but he was thinking of freedom!" isn't going to help a whole lot in calming you down. And that's if you're a freaking sociopath. Add on top of that that you kind of liked your slave, perhaps not fully grasping the perversity of your dominion over him, and that the two of you had become quite well-acquainted. If this is a born-to-slavery situation, you might have watched him grow up from a baby. And some dude just killed him because "he thought about freedom". More than that, would you as a slave-owner really be sure that the Emperor was going to stop with policing slaves? Are you that different from a slave, from the Emperor's perspective? Let alone from the perspective of a freaking demigod? I for one would not be particularly confident that I wouldn't be next on the list. Naively, one might say, "ah ha! But this is great! It keeps everyone in line!" Yeah, um, but it doesn't really work like that. "But did not Machiavelli say, tis better to be feared than loved?", a freshman might say. And then time-traveling Machiavelli would smack them over the head with a copy of Discourses on Livy and repeat his admonition that it is better to be feared than loved, but worst of all is to be hated, because while love is fickle and fear can be effective, hatred will destroy you. There is no example of a totalitarian regime of such pronounced brutality as "people killed for being dissatisfied with their station in life" lasting more than a few decades, let alone thousands of years.

In short: I doubt that killing slaves for "thinking about freedom" is a good way to prevent slave revolts, but it's sure a pretty good way to provoke a slaveowner revolt.

Going back to Runeterra, this is the kind of totalitarianism that would make even Demacia say, "Slow down, crazy."

http://i.imgur.com/tT9cx.jpg *big smile* "Slow down, crazy!"

I remain conflicted, because yes, I could imagine a freakish totalitarian regime in which people warp their own thoughts to avoid disloyalty on pain of death. I could also imagine the Ascended being so loyal to Shurima, and so readily accepting the mortal party line that the Emperor was Shurima incarnate, that Nasus would quite casually go around smashing people's skulls in for thinking about how nice it'd be to not be a slave. But it just doesn't sit right with me, and I don't get the feeling that this is "good-creepy", i.e., that it's supposed to unnerve the reader.

Also, wasn't there something about Xerath tricking Nasus and Renekton into leaving the capital? How'd he pull that off? If Ascended were a serious threat to disloyal slaves, and a straight reading of Xerath's remarks suggests that they were, how did this guy manage to make quite elaborately disloyal schemes to sabotage an Ascension ritual without getting caught?

Alternate reading

I think it might be possible to read Xerath's lore to avoid this bizarrely spooky version, though. Here are a few possible explanations:

• Xerath is ranting to himself in a somewhat crazed state, whipping himself up into a frenzy so that he can go through with his exceedingly dangerous plan. He's exaggerating.
• Xerath says that thinking about freedom was punished by death. While that might be the letter of the law, as a matter of enforcement, the only slaves who are killed for "thinking about freedom" are ones who "thought about freedom" in the sense of "organizing an armed rebellion".
• The Ascended are not Azir's soldiers. Perhaps a few times in the past, an Ascended had pointed out "hey, that lady over there, she's determined to kill the Emperor and free the slaves. Also, she's actually smart enough to do it. Better deal with her." That seems like the sort of threat to Shurima that an Ascended might care about.
• Perhaps reading minds isn't a trivial task for the Ascended. In Renekton's old lore, he went crazy from reading too many petty, scheming, nasty mortal minds. That might be carried over into the new lore: maybe Ascended are prone to losing it if they expose themselves too frequently to mortals' corrupt hearts. It might be easy for them to read minds in the sense that it's not a difficult spell, but they might refrain from using this ability except under extraordinary circumstances.
• The reality is that this sort of thing might happen, but that it's not even really at a "panopticon" threat-level for people who aren't crazy mages.
• To put a number on it, I'd say that there would be maybe a handful of executions for planned sedition every few years. And I'm sure they had a better explanation than "she was thinking about how nice it would be to be free."

Anyway. I'd appreciate any thoughts people have. While the straight reading does weird me out, I'm divided enough that I think maybe embracing it is correct, even if it severely warps my perception of several of these characters.