Vanzkah zahd Ghown, Queen Domina of Baarham
Summary
The terrible legacy of Sorcerer King Ghown lingers in history, fresh in the minds of the longest lived peoples, a fading memory to others. None more than his only inheritor and sole daughter, Vanzkah, bears its enormous weight. It is thanks to her and her alone that the baarham averted disaster that would have annihilated them all. Weaned at an early age, Vanzkah remained at her father's side day in and out for many decades. The centerpiece of the Dominion's ruling class, intrigue sought its way to her. In witnessing their punishments, she found a taste of her father's endless cruelty. Unlike him, she ever lacked the brutality he embodied. So she became an admirable daughter of a kind, excellent in every way. Or so others often believed. Vanzkah never earned her father's admiration, only a constant push and shove for further improvement. She strove to meet it, trying to impress him even only once. But, in his aloofness, his closest advisor and lover, Blerthorn, stood in as a surrogate parent. The Dominion's rule all but certain, the coming of the baarham's great banishment shattered her idyllic life. Ripped from the face of Veltrona along with the rest of her people, Vanzkah found a desolate world greeting them. With no Blerthorn for help and her father raging out of control, she became the de-facto leader of the baarham in an instant. Thus the first challenge for her to overcome was saving all her people from starving to death in an already dead world. It would only be the discovery of a city that saved her people. An oasis in an endless desert, filled with forsakened souls who wound up there. Vanzkah wasted no time orchestrating her people's supremacy in the city, swallowing up all kinds of disparate groups. This left the baarham on a collision course with the presiding warladies who controlled the city, at least when its ruler, the Padisah, wasn't looking. Strangely enough, a particular warlord came forth and brokered a deal with King Ghown. A way to return to Veltrona so that they could all enact their vengeance. Although she did not disagree with the idea, Vanzkah grew terrified of her father. Any semblance of the admirable baarham she knew had disappeared into a roiling sea of rage. For all her talent, she couldn't control him, and many underneath her grew frightened of their own future. It would be a most unexpected offer from the Padisah herself that saw Vanzkah drawn into dark, untouched corridors. No one knows what came of the meeting, but Vanzkah changed greatly, burdened by unspeakable truths. And so the baarham toiled for decades, until they found their way back to Veltrona. In the aftermath of the invasion and her father's death, Vanzkah assumed rulership over the Dominion. Faced with enemies on all sides, something not unusual to her at all, she slaved away trying to secure peace. At the same time, she ruthlessly sought out and destroyed the remnants of her father's rule: loyalists, ideologies, research, anything at all. What was too valuable to destroy was instead locked away inside dimensional vaults, hidden across Veltrona. She would end the tyrannical evil of the Dominion, and change the course of baarham history. All the same, not everyone would forgive her or them, forget, or tolerate what she was doing. The Dominion collapsed, split asunder into two great branches: those who followed Ghown's ways, and those who would follow Vanzkah's. Ghown's followers scattered across the world, hunted by Vanzkah and her new dictum for baarham's future. They would serve to protect the baatari, and in time, conquer the evil that had swallowed their people so utterly. But that was not enough, and wars followed, seeking to end the baarham before they found their footing again. They might've very well succeeded in doing so. The most unlikeliest of aides came, to the stunned awe of many, from Bloodwing, a former ruler of the hated Imperium. A deal was struck, and Vanzkah, her back already to another wall with several wars looming, begrudgingly accepted. So the baarham found a new home on Mount Skyreach, a desolate place long-since ruled by Bloodwing. No end of curiosity surrounded the event, for there is nothing more the baarham despise than dragons of any kind. That so many are willing to coincide the deal is intensely curious, but the truth remains buried in stone. Unwilling to anger Bloodwing, Vanzkah's enemies hovered on the horizon, waiting for their opportunities. A cold war followed, stretching into the centuries ever since. Many have forgotten their reasons for fighting the baarham, but old covenants are the hardest to break. In spite of everything, Vanzkah's credibility as a queen is unquestionable. Though her methods are cruel, her steel-like grip on the remaining baarham has kept them together. Changing the mindset of near-immortal beings is no simple undertaking, but even her opponents can see the effects. In time she may very well realize her goals, no matter how many are trying to pull her down.Power is what brought us low, and power is what brought us back. All the same there remains an easy road and a hard one. The easiest choices cost us the greatest. If no one will take the hard path, then I will drag all of you, kicking and screaming if I must.
Physical Description
General Physical Condition
With an exemplary physique emphasizing raw vitality, Vanzkah stands as an ideal baarham. She is more robust than the norm, to better endure the extraordinarily harsh magical arts she utilizes. Woe be to those who underestimate her because of a height difference.
Body Features
An ideal baarham woman, she has no exceptional features like tattoos, and is generally defined by her robust physique, plump bosom, and tight curves. She ended up shifting baarham standards of beauty upon her crowning. Being fatty invoked wealth and luxury to afford such poor health, but Vanzkah's unrelenting push for physical performance slapped that idea right out.
Her black, slightly grayish horns come out from the frontal forehead, above the eyebrows, and sweep backward across the skull in a curve. There is a bit of space between them and the hair, so it is not a firm fitting. Unlike other baarham horns, these ones are larger at the best and thicker further up, almost like natural shields. Their tips them curve outward from the skull, before turning forward in a short, stubby point. The smooth keratin ridges are quite refined by their standards, though some derisively call them "as smooth as dragon scales".
Facial Features
Round in the face with expressively circular eyes, Vanzkah expression almost always shows clearly what she's thinking. That she's constantly cross-looking and with a domineering demeanor is another matter. With her large horns, she can sharpen her face with a bit of hair styling and/or jewelry.
Identifying Characteristics
Inheriting her father's distinctive horns, those who know of baarham's history will recognize hers. The skull face of King Ghown and his V-shaped horns formed the stylized emblem of the Dominion. For many, it is an icon deeply buried in their history books, and others a living reminder of old nightmares.
Special abilities
Supreme Magic – With access to the greatest of baarham magical arts, and the inheritor of King Ghown, Vanzkah's magical prowess is in a league of its own. She can easily go blow-to-blow with Exalted beings, a feat that few in all of Veltrona can do. Some suppose she is even more powerful than King Ghown ever was, but there is no record of seeing it thus far.
Cyclonic Lightning – A unique form of magic and the signature style of King Ghown, it combines wind and lightning magic theory. Made with pure destruction in mind, its terribly uncontrollable nature outright kills incapable practitioners, making copycats almost unheard of. It could be said it is a purely baarham way of magic, but even they have trouble utilizing it.
Apparel & Accessories
In her queenly attire, Vanzkah wears a V-shaped, legless and armless dress fashioned from a black cloth. A flowing pattern is painted onto it, one of night skies and galaxies far away seen from Veltrona's surface. From her shoulders hangs a two-purpose cloth: down her backside it is a cape, and around her shoulders it functions like a shawl. Its black cloth is instead etched with red threading, offering a strong void-like contrast to the dress itself.
Across the furred portions of her arms and legs, metal bands of a silverdyne composite wrap around. The in-laid tourmaline jewels are cut into triangular, circular, rectangular, and so forth, geometric shapes. The seeming simplicity of this design belies the extraordinary sophistication that went into their creation. As one might when staring at a circuit board, it is built to a multi-layered purpose hard to discern at a glance. Such is rather typical of baarham nobility and their excessive craftswomanship. Her hoofed feet are also wrapped in metallic shoes of a similar nature, but with concessions for better walking.
The overall design has rather colorful implications in the native baarham cultures. By Vanzkah's declaration, she is, "to be the void between the stars," as it translates to. Traditional baarham thinking considers the stars to be divine beings of some kind; another strain considers the void between them itself a greater, more omnipotent state of being. There can be no light if darkness was not there, so the thought goes. Thus she imparts a clear message of herself as aspiring toward a divine nature; a higher state of a powerful being.
She does not wear a crown or head gear of any kind.
Mental characteristics
Gender Identity
Female
Sexuality
Bisexual
Education
Being the daughter of the former Sorcerer King, nothing was spared toward educating Vanzkah. With the most capable of tutors and the baarham's oldest and most complete works, she is perhaps one of the most well educated people in the entire world. At the least, her conception and utilization of magical arts is a league of its own that other baarham became desperate to learn from.
Mental Trauma
The baarham's exile left permanent scars in her mind, an intangible fear of being deprived everything with little warning. It also became an unerring awareness of powers that far exceeded the entirety of people. Though she holds them in little regard, Vanzkah became that much more cautious of directly earning their ire.
Intellectual Characteristics
Raised in an environment of constant social predation, Vanzkah's social tact is unerringly sharp. Intrigue and diplomacy alike are wielded as weapons, and she is ever poised to keep people off-balance. It could be said it's easier being under her power than trying to stand up to her, something that is very much by design. Tempered by constant study and extreme practice, she has an exemplary mind suited for the demands of millennia-long rulership. With such a perspective, her cruelty is itself a weapon to be used, a language universal to every species on Veltrona. All that matters is the results of her ambitions and directives; so long as the collateral is within tolerable limits, that's just business. If her father had been a raging fire, she is a cold and calculating terror.
Morality & Philosophy
Being all too aware of how baarham came to be, it is the legacy of Blerthorn and his baatari that changed Vanzkah's mind the most. A living proof that baarham could change, and divert from the desire that is power. Recognizing the need for that, undertaking the titanic task of changing baarham has become her life's goal. Unlike either one of her fathers, Vanzkah is trying to thread the needle–to have power, without succumbing to desiring it. It remains to be seen if she can achieve such a lofty goal.
For her part, Vanzkah abhors pointless evils and destructive thinking. She is purposeful to a fault, but sees such things as tools to use when needed. In this respect, she can be surprisingly kind by old baarham standards, and far worse than any of her peers, depending. Being all that, she is stringent over laws, contracts, and ensuring proper procedure is observed. Unlike many other culture, this is not for formalities or tradition's sake. In the baarham mindset, such rules are life-and-death to their social structure. They only have as much power as the consequences, and so all baarham ensure there are consequences.
Personality Characteristics
Motivation
Born at the height of power, Vanzkah wanted for little but the simplest of life's bounty: family, friends, and a safe place. Such things are novel luxuries to the baarham, and reality forced them far away from her grasp. Yet she never lost sight of those items, even as corruptible taste of power tempted her. In the long years since youth, the harshness of life and the unbelievable turns of history have sharpened her to a perfect edge.
Thus her deep, intrinsic desire to see that future realized for her people. To avert the disastrous fall into power that consumed her father, and to gain control over themselves once again. A proverbial recovery and healing of the baarham people, through their own way of doing so. Vanzkah cannot even imagine what such a world would look like, but she is determined to pull every baarham toward it. One could call her goals noble, though the methods are certainly points of contention.
Current Location
Species
Honorary & Occupational Titles
Rulership in the baarham mindset is done through power alone. King Ghown established the precedent, and Queen Vanzkah continues it. Although she is markedly less cruel than her father, Vanzkah spares no effort in establishing herself as the supreme power. By declaring herself Queen Domina, she shows to all those who are baarham that she is the top of their social hierarchy. Unlike King Ghown, who sought to rule all magic, Queen Vanzkah focuses on controlling baarham instead.
Professions
Year of Birth
863 TD
1572 Years old
Children
Gender
Female
Eyes
Expressively round eyes; black sclera, crimson iris
Hair
Solid black, shoulder length, often braided at the ends
Skin Tone/Pigmentation
Dark Brown
Height
Small-Medium
Weight
Moderate
Comments