Valmaia Alric
The Walking Flame Valmaia,
Valmaia was born to a tiefling fugitive and a grieving widower in a devout village within The Ironfold province of Cathlidia. Though her father raised her in secrecy, her tiefling traits eventually emerged, drawing the wrath of the Church of the Radiant Flame. Branded as an infernal, she and her father were imprisoned and tortured. Her life became a ritual of pain and “purification.”
Everything changed the night they brought in Ka’rozzel, the Wretched Chain. The Church believed exposure to a fiend would force out her corruption. Instead, it awakened it. Valmaia forged a pact not out of ambition, but in defiant survival. She rose, slaughtered her captors, and burned the prison to the ground.
Appearance
Valmaia's presence is chilling and resolute. Her skin is etched with scars both visible and unseen. Two small horn nubs peek from her scalp, repeatedly severed by her tormentors and now allowed to regrow. Her icy blue eyes burn with unrelenting clarity—neither wholly mortal nor fiendish.
She dresses in practical dark leathers, her cloak clasped with a scorched sigil of a broken chain circled in flame. Her armor is marked by runes etched in infernal iron—gifts from Ka’rozzel and forged by her will.
Personality
Valmaia is stoic, haunted, and relentless. She does not trust easily, and offers no mercy to the agents of the Church. Her sense of justice is personal and brutal. Yet beneath the armor is a flicker of yearning—for belonging, for truth, and for answers her vengeance cannot provide.
Alignment
Chaotic Neutral
Age
24
Birthplace
Children
Gender
Female
Eyes
Blue
Hair
Black
Skin Tone/Pigmentation
Blue-Gray
Height
5'7
Weight
165
Not All Chains Bind
Date: Unknown
Location: Unknown
The child’s name was Tessa. She couldn’t have been older than seven—mud-streaked, barefoot, and trembling with fever beneath a collapsed cart on the side of the old road. Her cries were weak, barely audible over the distant clang of bells from the nearby chapel. I almost missed her.
I didn’t.
She flinched when I approached—saw the horns, the eyes, the shadows curling behind my heels like waiting wolves. She asked if I was a ghost. I told her no.
“Then why do you look like one?” she whispered.
Because ghosts are what the Church makes us into.
Her ankle was twisted badly, and the wounds on her arms were half-infected. I called a small, flickering flame into my palm—soft and controlled—and used it to sterilize a cloth from my pack. She didn’t scream when I cleaned the cuts. She just looked at me like I was something impossible.
“Why are you helping me?”
“Because no one else did.”
“…Are you a witch?”
“No. I’m worse, to some people.”
“Are you going to curse me?”
“No, little ember. I’m going to make sure you stand again.”
I was still binding her ankle when the shouting started.
A Brother of the Church of the Radiant Flame came striding through the brush, his blade already drawn. He looked from me to the child, and in his eyes—ah, yes—I saw exactly what he wanted to see: a devil cradling a broken child in the woods. The oldest lie in their book.
He roared that I had taken her. That I had cursed her blood. That I was feeding on her purity like some storybook fiend.
Tessa tried to speak. She told him I helped her. That I healed her. That I was kind.
He struck her across the mouth.
I didn’t kill him. I could have. I almost did.
Instead, I stood between them, summoned the chains from my pact, and held him there—hovering an inch above the earth, suspended like a spider in her web. I leaned close, and I whispered:
“If you ever raise a hand to a child again, I will show you what true damnation looks like. You call yourself a servant of the flame. I am the flame.”
He ran. As they always do.
But not before swearing he’d report me to the cathedral. That a hunt would come. That they’d burn the forest to smoke me out.
Let them try.
I carried Tessa on my back all the way to Solrest. Left her with a healer who owed me a favor. Gave her a satchel of food, some silver, and a tiny chain-link pendant I’d carved from scrap iron.
“For protection?” she asked.
“For truth,” I told her.
Not all chains are cages.
Some are choices.
And mine was forged long ago.
—V
The Holy and the Hollow
Date: Unknown
Location: Road outside Solrest
They never change.
His name was Inquisitor Vellan, though I only learned that after the shouting stopped. His presence gave him away long before his words did—robes too clean, blade too polished, eyes that glowed like he’d stared into the fire too long and decided it was his to command. A high-ranking emberborn of the Church. One of Solmara’s “true sons.”
He found me at a crossroads altar—a charred effigy of the Saint still stood there, arms outstretched in burned wood and iron nails. I’d stopped to rest, to listen, to remember.
He saw me kneeling beside it and didn’t even ask my name. He only hissed the word: “Abomination.”
I turned slowly. He had his sword already half-drawn, the blindfold pushed back so I could see the disgust in his eyes. I wanted to laugh—how much faith does it take to blind yourself for the Saint, only to peel it away when judgment feels too personal?
“You carry the mark of sin,” he said. “I smell the rot in your blood.”
“You smell your own hypocrisy,” I told him.
He spat scripture like it was flame. Told me Solmara’s light would not suffer me to live. That my magic, my blood, my very breath defied the natural order. That even now, I was proof of the Enduring Bastion’s divine wrath. He spoke with such certainty. Like killing me would earn him sainthood. Like my pain would be his salvation.
I let him finish.
Then I showed him what salvation really feels like.
Not the blade. Not fire. Not death.
I let him live.
I called the chains to my side, draped them in smoke, and stepped toward him without striking. I let the infernal power flicker in my gaze—let it fill the silence like a scream held just behind clenched teeth. He backed away. Trembling. Praying. Not fighting.
And I told him: “If your Saint still watches… tell her I remember the dungeon.”
He ran.
He’ll tell the Church. He’ll call me a monster. He’ll spin it like I fled. Like I feared her fire. But I know the truth. And so does he.
His faith cracked today.
And with time, maybe it’ll collapse.
I’ll light the match when it does.
—V
A Spark Beneath the Blindfold
Date: Unknown
Location: Solrest
Tonight, I met one of them. Not in battle. Not in chains. Just… on the road. Like any other traveler.
He wore the white vestments of the Church of the Radiant Flame—simple, unadorned, yet unmistakable. His blindfold was real, golden-threaded and worn tight. His name was Brother Malric.
We crossed paths at a ruined shrine along the edge of the old road, just as the sun was bleeding into the horizon. I could’ve struck him down. My hand hovered near my weapon more than once. But he didn’t flinch, not even when he looked—or felt—the infernal pulse behind my eyes.
He spoke softly. Too softly. Like a man still listening for divine approval in every word he said.
“I sense burden in you,” he said.
I replied, “I carry fire.”
He nodded. “Then you understand Solmara’s pain.”
I said, “No. I understand her mistake.”
That’s when he really looked at me—blindfold or not, I could feel the tension behind his quiet faith start to twist. He asked if I’d ever heard the Testament of the Ninth Flame, some obscure passage scrawled in burn-char across the base of the old cathedral ruins.
He recited it for me. Something about enduring until your skin sloughs and your soul is laid bare before judgment. That the fire only spares the obedient.
I asked him if the fire had ever spared him. He hesitated.
It turns out Malric wasn’t an inquisitor. He wasn’t Ember Chain. He was a scribe—one who had spent the last decade transcribing the journals of other men. Torturers, zealots, martyrs.
“I never hurt anyone,” he said. “Only wrote what they saw. What they believed.”
I asked if he believed it too.
His answer came slowly: “I did. Until I read about the girl in the dungeon.”
I didn’t move. My heart thundered once. Maybe twice. He didn’t know it was me—not really. Just the story. The “case” that cracked something in him. He said her name wasn’t recorded. That she screamed through every branding, never broke, never begged. That her fire burned brighter with every purge they tried to force.
“They called her the Unburnt Sin,” he said. “But I don’t think she was the sinner.”
We were quiet for a long time after that.
Then I told him, gently, “She remembers every scream. Especially the ones from her father.”
His face paled. The fire between us crackled. I let the truth settle in the air like smoke. He didn’t run. He didn’t cry. He just bowed his head.
“Then may I bear witness to your flame,” he whispered.
I left him there, kneeling at the shrine, blindfold damp with tears. I don’t know if he’ll leave the Church. I don’t know if he can.
But I saw something rare in him.
Doubt.
And in a place like Cathlidia, where blind obedience is currency and fire is god, doubt is the first spark of rebellion.
May he burn the right bridges.
—V
Regret of an Oath, Fire of the Fallen
Date: Unknown
Location: Edge of Drelvar Hold
I crossed paths with a paladin today.
I don’t know why I expected them to be different. Clean. Shining. A knight of virtue, sworn to justice. But instead, I found a broken man in rusted armor, whose sword had seen as much blood as his soul had seen darkness.
He called himself Kaelen, an Oathbreaker. His eyes were hollow, like he had already cast himself into some eternal night, and in truth, I wasn’t sure if he was still living or merely existing.
He didn’t know who I was when I first saw him. Just a wanderer, a desperate soul like so many I’ve met on this path. He didn’t ask about my horns. Didn’t flinch. He didn’t care about the red stain of my past, so long as I wasn’t an enemy.
We sat by the fire, eating the stale rations he offered without complaint. He spoke little, and when he did, it was more about the land—the way the trees whispered at night, the cold bite of betrayal that even the mountains could feel. When I told him I had little interest in the serenity of nature, his response was simple:
"Nature doesn’t care if you break your oath. It doesn’t judge you for what you’ve done."
I suppose I expected more. I wanted him to condemn me, or tell me about the "right path" or preach to me like some damn fool cleric. But Kaelen didn’t do that. Instead, he sat across from me like he saw the same pain in me that mirrored his own.
When I finally asked him how he had broken his oath, his answer came slowly, like a confession he had told a hundred times but still didn’t understand himself.
He had once been the champion of a god—one who stood for justice, purity, and vengeance. But then, the day came when he was forced to make a choice. His oath, his god, or his family. And in the end, when the walls fell, when the blood spilled, he abandoned it all. He chose his family.
But there was no redemption in his choice. No salvation.
I didn’t tell him that I understood. I didn’t need to. The weight of his silence was enough.
Later that night, as the stars blanketed the sky, he looked at me with something like pity—though he did his best to hide it.
"I can see it in your eyes," he said softly. "You’ve made your choice. And it’s a path that leads only to fire."
It was a simple statement. A warning, maybe. But it carried a weight I felt deep in my chest. His words felt like an echo of something I’ve known for a long time—there is no saving me. Not from myself, and not from the flames that burn inside me.
I asked him, before I left, if he regretted it. His answer wasn’t the one I expected.
"I regret the loss of my soul," he said, his voice broken. "But not the loss of my oath."
I don’t think I’ll ever forget his face when he said that—tired, resigned, and strangely… free.
There are nights when I wonder if that’s what I’ve become. An Oathbreaker in my own right, bound to a different path, torn between the blood of my past and the fire of my future. A weapon forged in torment, but without the clarity of a god’s light to guide me.
I left him as the sun rose, not looking back, but feeling the sting of his words still heavy in my mind.
Maybe one day I’ll break my own oath. To my father. To the Church. To the girl I was.
But for now… I will walk this path until the flame consumes me completely.
—V
Smoke Without Fire
Date: Unknown
Location: A collapsed windmill outside Delvar
They call it a "camp."
It’s more of a grave that refused to close.
There are maybe fifteen of them—horned and hollow-eyed, hiding beneath rotted canvas and illusion spells that flicker when it rains. Children, mostly. Some old. A couple like me, shaped by suffering and still trying to make the shape mean something.
They didn’t recognize me at first. That was a gift. I watched from the edge of the trees, hidden behind a glamour and guilt. One girl had tiny stub-horns and a too-large coat. She was trying to light a cooking fire with no tinder and no help, her fingers shaking in the cold. She reminded me of myself. Before the chains. Before the fire.
I stepped in.
Lit the fire with a snap of my fingers.
She flinched like I'd hit her.
That’s the thing people don’t talk about—how even your own kind can look at you like you’re the next storm. And maybe I am. But I didn’t hurt her. I just handed her a spark.
Later, a man named Drevon—one horn cracked clean off—asked me who I was. I lied. Said I was a traveler. Said I used to be with the Church.
The look in his eyes was pure hate.
Good.
I want to remember that.
They’ve survived raids, exorcists, mobs, starvation. They tell their stories like lullabies. One boy spoke of watching his mother hung from a sun-blessed chain while the crowd sang hymns. He smiled when he said it—smiled, like it wasn’t real anymore.
I could have burned the whole sky for him in that moment.
But I didn’t. I stayed.
I taught them things. How to hide better. How to use shadows. How to speak infernal not as a curse, but as a shield. I showed one of the older girls how to summon a chain like mine. She cried when it first wrapped around her hand—not because it hurt, but because it didn’t.
They started whispering my name by the third day.
Valmaia.
Chain-Witch.
Demonmother.
I hate that one.
I left before sunrise this morning. Didn't say goodbye. If I stayed longer, I’d start to believe I belonged. And I don’t. I’m not their savior. I’m the fire they survived.
Still…
I left them supplies. A few old scrolls. A warding charm soaked in my blood.
I carved a rune into the tree line: If the Church comes, run north. Follow the flame.
I hope they don’t have to use it.
I hope they remember the fire is not always the enemy.
Sometimes, it’s the only thing that remembers you were meant to burn back.
— V
Night of a Dimming Moon
Date: Unknown
Location: Campsight
The fire was low tonight. Not dead—just simmering, like me.
Ka’rozzel sat across from me, back straight, chains slack around his limbs like they were resting too. He doesn’t need the fire. He doesn’t feel cold. I think he just likes the way it flickers in my eyes.
I asked him why he followed me. He didn’t speak for a long while. Just watched the flames. Sometimes I wonder if he still sees things in them—memories, regrets, torment. He’s not what people think devils are. Not all laughter and contracts. He is silence. Chains. Pressure.
And then he said, “You carry what I was. Before the breaking.”
I asked if he meant the pain, and he tilted his head. “No. The rage without shape. The hunger to be more than a wound.”
We talked quietly after that. About what it means to be forged in suffering. About how vengeance is not a path—it’s a forge. You go into it burning, and you either come out tempered… or nothing at all.
He told me something I didn’t expect: that sometimes he envies me.
Not for my power. Not even for my freedom.
But because I still remember my father’s voice.
He doesn't remember the voice that begged Azhi-Kael to end it. Or the hands that reached for help and never got it. He remembers chains. Pain. And the relief of surrendering to something worse just so it would stop.
I didn’t say anything for a while after that. Just listened to the wind over the stone.
Then I said something I hadn’t told anyone, maybe not even myself.
I said, “Sometimes I still wake up and think he’s nearby. Like I can hear my father stoking the fire in the hearth.”
Ka’rozzel didn’t mock me. He didn’t call it weakness. He just nodded.
“That is what they could not burn out of you,” he said. “That is what makes you dangerous.”
So I sat there in the quiet with a devil, and for a moment, I wasn’t a weapon. I wasn’t a monster. I wasn’t even a warlock.
I was just a girl by a fire, holding onto a memory that refuses to die.
And for once… that was enough.
—V
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.
A Pact Bound in Pain
When Valmaia first laid eyes on Ka’rozzel, he was not a devil in chains—he was the chains. A monument to suffering, a creature more torment than flesh. Yet unlike the priests who dragged her screaming into the bowels of the dungeon, Ka’rozzel did not speak in scripture. He spoke in understanding. In the shared silence of captivity, their bond was not forged with words—it was scorched into their bones.
The Pact: A Choice Made in Rage
The Church believed Ka’rozzel would break her. That proximity to a true fiend would unravel the last of Valmaia’s humanity. Instead, it revealed her. When he offered her a pact, it wasn’t seduction. It was solidarity. A raw, searing choice:
“You can remain their sacrifice… or become their judgment.”
She chose power, but not for glory—for vengeance. For survival. For the father who died chained at her side. That moment was less a deal and more a merging. Ka’rozzel didn’t claim her soul. He awakened the inferno already inside it.
What They Are to Each Other
Ka’rozzel is not her master. He is her reflection.
He does not whisper orders—he reminds her of who she is and who she could become. He is pain given form, and to Valmaia, he is both warning and guide.
Their relationship is layered, full of tension and strange intimacy:
Mentor and Weapon – Ka’rozzel teaches her to wield the power of chains, flame, and infernal fury not as spells, but as memories turned to blades. Every chain she summons is a chain broken. Every spell, an echo of what they survived.
Co-conspirators in Vengeance – They share a target: the Church of the Radiant Flame. But where Valmaia still wrestles with morality and loss, Ka’rozzel feels only wrath. He pushes her, tempts her to burn it all, to let go of what remains of her humanity.
Emotional Mirror – He understands her like no mortal can. When she wakes screaming from memories, he doesn’t comfort—he remembers with her. Their pain resonates, intertwines. It’s not affection they share. It’s recognition.
Telepathic Bond
Through the pact, Valmaia often hears Ka’rozzel in her mind—not constantly, but in moments of extreme emotion: rage, fear, despair. His voice is like iron dragged across stone, cold and sharp. Sometimes he’s silent for days. Other times, he speaks in riddles that only make sense after blood has been spilled.
“Chains remember, flame forgets. What do you want to be?”
Complications: Who Holds the Leash?
Despite their bond, there’s a constant tension—how much of Valmaia is still hers? Ka’rozzel claims he does not control her, but his presence is always there, lurking at the edge of her power. Is he truly a partner… or a parasite waiting to become something more?
Valmaia doesn’t know.
She just knows that when she calls, he answers.
A Flame Forsaken
In the months that followed the fall of the Radiant Flame's bastion, whispers of Valmaia’s wrath spread like smoke through the borderlands. Villages once loyal to the church fell silent in her wake. Sanctuaries stood abandoned, their walls scorched with the symbol she carved into stone and flesh alike—a broken chain, encircled in flame. But vengeance, as sweet as it tasted, did little to soothe the hollow ache in her chest.
That ache had a name.
Her mother.
The face she only knew from a single, half-burnt sketch her father had kept hidden in a locked drawer. The voice she had never heard. The presence she had longed for in every moment of her agony. Valmaia had grown up believing her mother dead or stolen away. But when the fiend’s whispers reached into the marrow of her memories, they stirred more than rage—they stirred questions. Ka’rozzel had seen into her soul, and through its infernal connection, it glimpsed things Valmaia had never known. Her mother was alive.
And she had left them.
The truth struck deeper than any priest’s blade: her mother had not been hunted, nor slain in a desperate attempt to return. She had fled. She had chosen survival over defiance. She had walked away.
Valmaia told herself she wanted answers. That this search was about understanding. Closure. But beneath the surface, venom festered. Her father had died screaming, bones shattered under the boots of the faithful, and her mother—her own blood—had not been there to stop it. Had not even tried. If she had stood by them, perhaps they could’ve escaped. Perhaps the chains would never have been forged.
The thought haunted her as much as it fueled her.
So she searched. Through forgotten border towns, among tiefling enclaves hidden deep in the wilds, in cities where devil-blooded folk whispered of a woman with eyes like dusk and a voice that cracked like wind through glass. Each clue, each name, each false lead drove the blade deeper.
Sometimes she imagined what she would say.
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.
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