The Flame Walks

Since the night she turned the Church’s dungeon into a crypt, Valmaia has wandered through Cathlidia and beyond like a smoldering storm—never fully still, never fully welcome. She doesn’t seek peace. She seeks purpose. Every step she takes is a lesson carved into the scars she carries, and the world around her is beginning to learn: she is not to be touched lightly.

 
The Chains Become Her Blade
In the early days of her freedom, her power was raw and feral—her pact with Ka’rozzel had awakened her, but it had not taught her control. The infernal chains that erupted from her hands would lash out unpredictably, cracking stone or wrapping too tight around an enemy’s throat. She nearly killed a child in a border village who tried to rob her—nearly. She stopped it, just in time. That was the moment she knew: power without mastery would turn her into what the Church said she was.

 
So she trained.

 
In ruins and caves, on blood-slick fields and desolate roads, she honed her Pact of the Blade. Ka’rozzel’s teachings were not formal—they came in flashes of sensation and memory. Every strike was a reenactment of her torment, and every parry was defiance made real. Her chains are now an extension of her will—coiling, searing, alive with sentience. She’s learned to shape them like whips, swords, even claws of iron flame.

 
When she fights, it is not beautiful—it is personal. Her enemies are bound, broken, and burned, as she once was.

 
“You sought to bind me. Let me return the favor.”

 

 
Learning to Control the Infernal
Magic is no longer just vengeance—it’s become her language. Her spellcasting has grown from raw fire to precise destruction. She’s learned rituals that bind spirits, and incantations that can unmake holy wards. She’s walked into old temples and left them hollow. She’s faced paladins and inquisitors and shown them what true judgment looks like.

 
But she still hears Ka’rozzel in the quiet.

 
“The flame devours everything—unless you feed it purpose.”

 
So she focuses. She restrains the hunger in her power. She fights battles worth fighting: corrupt nobles, inquisitor holdouts, cults rising in the void left behind by the Church’s collapse. She carves a name not just in blood, but in memory.

 

 
How the World Sees Her
To the Church, she is a heretic, a devil-born blight, a living apostasy. They whisper of her like a boogeyman: “the Chain-Witch,” “the Broken Flame,” “Valmaia the Unclean.”

 
To the broken and hunted, she is a myth with horns—a weapon made flesh who strikes where justice has fled.

 
To herself, she is… unfinished. Still becoming.

 
Her power grows. Her legend spreads. But the search for her mother still burns in the center of it all. Not even chains or flames can smother that yet.