The Embered Beginning

Valmaia was born on the edge of a quiet village south of Zalthera, a place steeped in old-world traditions and devout human faith. Her mother, a frail and desperate tiefling, had snuck into the outskirts of the village, driven by starvation and fear. She stumbled into the home of a grieving widower—a man whose loneliness outweighed his prejudice. He offered her sanctuary, hiding her from the ever-watchful eye of the local church.
 
In the shelter of secrecy, compassion blossomed into something more. An affair ignited between the unlikely pair, and not long after, Valmaia came into the world. Yet her mother knew the village would never accept what she was—what her child might become. Seeing that the newborn bore a mostly human appearance, she made the painful choice to leave Valmaia behind in her father’s care. To protect her, he told the village she had been left on his doorstep by an unknown woman passing through.
 
But as Valmaia grew, her inhuman features began to emerge. Small things at first—unsettling mannerisms, peculiar eyes, an unnatural presence. Whispers began to circle, and the church took notice. They watched her closely, sensing something unholy beneath the surface. The moment her budding horns began to poke through her hair, their fears were confirmed.
 
In the dead of night, the Church of the Radiant Flame acted. Valmaia and her father were seized and thrown into the bowels of the church’s dungeon, branded as sinners and vessels of the infernal. The priests believed Valmaia was possessed—that her demonic blood could be purged through pain, discipline, and "divine" correction. What followed was not salvation, but torment.
 
Her father was beaten and broken before her eyes. She was subjected to horrors no child should endure—starvation, mutilation, unspeakable abuses, and cruel experiments. Her horns were sawn off again and again as they regrew. Her skin bore the marks of fire and blade, her body used as both a warning and a weapon in the church’s twisted war against demons. Through it all, her cries were met with scripture, her suffering justified by hollow sermons of purity and redemption.
 
But everything changed the night the church brought a true fiend into the dungeon—Ka'rozzel, the Wretched Chain, shackled and gagged, intended as a test subject for their most depraved exorcisms. They believed it would reveal how to finally "cleanse" Valmaia.
 
Instead, it awakened her.
In the silence between their shared torment, the fiend whispered to her—not in words, but in sensation. Rage, power, vengeance. It saw her pain, and it offered her a choice. To remain broken, or to rise.
 
Valmaia took the pact.
 
The change was immediate. The air around her darkened, and power bloomed beneath her skin like wildfire. Her broken body healed. Her mind sharpened. Chains snapped beneath her touch as infernal energy surged through her veins.
 
That night, the church became a tomb.
 
She unleashed hell upon her captors, tearing through them with a fury born of years of silent screams. No one was spared—the priests, the inquisitors, the devout who turned blind eyes to her suffering. Their cries echoed down the halls that once held her captive. Fire licked the walls. Blood stained the altar.
 
By dawn, the church stood in ruins, reduced to cinders and bone.
 
Valmaia walked free, scarred but reborn—not as a victim, but as an instrument of reckoning. She left behind the ashes of her past with a single vow: to destroy the god who had turned his back on her, and to burn down every sanctified lie in his name.
 
She is no longer afraid.
She is the flame.
And the world will learn to fear it.