Difference between revisions of "Valeriana"

Valeriana was born in the year 88 BC in the city of Pompeii to a wealthy merchant father and the whore that he had happened to arbitrarily choose to bed that night, a fugitive from Gaul who had ended up working in a brothel in the Roman city. Born, as you'd expect, around about nine months after her conception, Valeriana was brought into this world on what we now call the 14th of September. A troublesome time from the moment she was born, her mother unfortunately dying of childbirth, she was raised by the madame and the girls, and learned from them one thing; you lie, you cheat, you steal, you do whatever it takes for you and your family, and your family is exactly who you want them to be. So, taking this amoral world advice to heart, Valeriana started her life out as a dip- a street urchin pick-pocket, a toe-rag, emptying the pockets of the rich men that came to sleep with the women of ill repute and then distributing the spoils among her surrogate family. This early advantage in trickery, dishonesty and sneakiness would come in handy later on, as one fateful day Valeriana decided to sit down and gamble her spoils, and the wheels of fate played their hand...

Losing all your money at your first visit to the gambling table is a demoralising experience at best, usually. With literally a single coin left to gamble, the feisty teen rolled the dice just one more time... and thought, begged, hoped so hard at them. And even though they came up three and one, far below what she required to win... somehow, she still looked around to see the players cursing and shoveling their money towards her. Why? Why? And then she realised... that flickering images of sixes weren't just her hoping. They were... they were visible. Real! Well, not real. Illusionary. Indeed, she'd been born with that rarest of inbuilt gifts- she was a mage! And that's when she decided what new direction her crimes should take- the more magical. A trickster mage. And why not? There was a new, senior military commander for the Roman forces coming to town... and there was sure to be opportunity to be found there!

Having just successfully stolen and made off with a massive some of money from one of the more prominent newly-appointed Generals of the time, Valeriana made her way to the capital city of Rome. However, just when she thought her entire scheme had gone off entirely without a hitch, she was approached one day in the street by an aged, crooked woman, hooded and robed all in grey. With a Disney-villain cackle and a menacing tone, the crone explained to Valeriana that not only were 'they' aware of exactly who Valeriana was, down to a tee, they were quite aware of how she had come about her new wealth... and the means by which the event had occurred. Offered a choice between accompanying the hag to her organisation or being handed in to the angered military man, bound hand and foot, Valeriana took the only rational route and chose to meet this secret society. Led to a cave outside the city, she was met by four other women who explained with smiles that she had just been formally invited into the Coven of Reme.

The Coven was a secret society of all-female magic users devoted to limiting the powers and influences of the Roman and Greek Gods on Earth, so that their disputes did not spill out into the mortal world, alongside the development of their own magical talents. The five other members were:

-Decanea, a Dacian called the Wild Sage, whose powers gave her sway over the lands and beasts;
-Cassandra, an Egyptian called the Desert Witch, whose sphere was famine, disease, and consuming flame;
-Esselle, a Greek known as the Magus of Souls, whose abilities gave her sway over the dead, both in body and soul;
-Aemiliana, a simple Roman farmgirl come to be called the Lifeseer, the sweetest and most pure of them all, whose gift was the healing and mending of all;
-The Crone, also known as the Prophet, a woman of mysterious past whose simple gift was to Know things- and also the woman that found Valeriana, and the High Priestess of their Coven.

Valeriana joined into this sacred sisterhood as the Trickster Mage, her gift over the minds of people giving her a place as their group's resident illusionist.

Aemiliana came up with a simple way to sustain the lives of the entire Coven- by teaching each of the Remites a simple healing spell, they could keep their bodies at the same state they were the previous day, bar any large changes such as sustained wounds or gaining of new knowledge. Armed with this fountain of youth, the Ancient Roman Dream Team had many great adventures, always directed by their High Priestess, keeping the affairs of the Gods, such as the ceaseless bickering of Athena and Poseidon, from harming the humans of their world. Escapades such as their disruption of one of Dionysus' wild parties that enveloped an entire city entered the folklore of the time, and they built up quite the list of grudges from the various divines... but also a certain measure of grudging respect. Things stayed like this until the rise of a new Emperor, centuries later, and the breaking of the Empire... tragedy came to the Coven when the Empire came to Byzantium.

With the declaration that the religion of the Empire under Constantine was to become Christianity, the power of the Coven's antagonists waned as their base of worshipers did... however, the religion of Christ had within it no room for the occult of the past. Where once the Coven were legends, heroes, public opinion turned, and they were forced to enter hiding. The first Inquisitors and Witch Hunters began conducting searches throughout the Empire for any who dared to practice magic or pagan religion, and it came unto Valeriana to conceal her and her friends from their piercing gaze. However, this was not to last, for, fittingly, they had within their ranks a Judas. Cassandra, feeling that their Coven would not survive the Inquisition, betrayed her sisters to a roving band of hunters. As the pack descended upon the group, including Valeriana's then-lover Darius, they fought as best they could... but once the knife kissed Aemiliana's throat, their spirit broke. The hunters slaughtered all the witches, including Cassandra, bar Valeriana... who hid, until their daggers took her husband.

There is still no full explanation for the new power that came into the world in that moment. What little survives from witness reports of the Event describe it as a simple... ceasing. A three-hundred-metre diameter sphere of the land left existence, leaving a clean bowl of dirt with Valeriana at its center, hands glowing with the temporal power of the universe itself. Something... perhaps some rage, perhaps the pity of a fading divine that believed their foes deserved a more noble death than they were granted... had given Valeriana the power of chronomancy, limited potential to affect time itself. Preserving all the knowledge she could from the cave before wiping it from existence, she fled from the world for many hundreds of years, until the advent of the first millennium after the death of Christ, and when she returned, in Dark Ages England, all knowledge of the Coven had been erased from history, their legend forgotten, their songs left unsung. As the de facto High Priestess of the Coven of Reme, she set about containing the threats created by the new extraplanar threats these Abrahamic religions had spawned: demons, angels and fae creatures.

Back with a vengeance, the formerly-whimsical girl had grown up, and now took the fight to her foes, both interdimensional invaders and the zealots throwing people into lakes to determine if they were witches or not- of course, highly inexperienced people that had no way to deal with this whirlwind of magical fury. After twenty years of this cycle of rage, she realised that it was time to move on- to take her war to the realms beyond our own, and avoid punishing those that were only doing what they believed in for the actions of murderers long-since dead. And so, with warrioress Aldreda the Lion in tow, she began to tour the other planes, two women taking on a hermaphroditic succubus queen whom they castrated when she threatened them with her 'attentions' and removing the faith of a particularly self-righteous angel by asking him to explain the appendix. They grew close- intimately so- but, Aldreda, as a mortal, eventually succumbed to the march of the ages, and Valeriana was left alone and heatbroken. Realising she could not have a 'life' in the traditional sense, anymore, she retreated once more into seclusion... until nineteen thirty-nine.

The echoes of the second world war reached the immortal Valeriana even in her planar sanctum, and the great suffering on the horizon finally stirred her. She returned to her home world for the first time in almost a millennium, and set to work healing where she could, unwilling to use her power to harm, taking the approach her dear sister Aemiliana had always preferred. She met Daniel Day, a medic with the British armed forces as he tended the wounded, and once more fell in love. Their bond went deep, two healers, but after the atrocities in the later stages of the war- the Holocaust, and the dropping of Little Boy and Fat Man- Valeriana realised that not using her strength to help was tantamount to allowing evil, as Burke meant when he said "All it takes for evil to prevail is for a few good men to do nothing..." Marrying Daniel, she took up the superheroic identity of Card Trick in the wake of the ending of the war, and worked to prevent other massive conflicts from devouring lives.

After intervening where she could to help prevent the policy of mutually assured destruction from coming to fruition, and destroying invasive planar forces that had grown bold in the wake of humanity's industrialisation, Valeriana realised as she had so many years ago with Aldreda that Daniel was going to die. With age had come maturity, though, and this time, she sat with him, and smiled, helping him through, and finally letting go of the ghosts of her past. She returned to a particular dint in the Earth of Italy, and erected seven tombstones for the family she had lost over the millennia, and finally found inner peace, letting go of her ghosts. Armed with a new resolve, she returned to her superheroic duties, this time doing her utmost to be just rather than vengeful, to negotiate peace where she could and to limit the fallout of her actions when she could not. It was when the portal opened, however, in the early twenty-first century, that the next great chapter of her life would begin.

Investigating this occult disturbance as if any other, she walked through into a new world, an endless plane where the stars were portals to new parts of the land and Gods vied for the hearts and minds of all the occupants. She had stepped into Asseria, and was soon informed by a friendly native, a large bovine creature known as a Fearrik, that the magical energies of the plane had been disrupted, and this meant their seers feared that one of the Gods, the Drake of Dreams, had lost its way and was descending into madness, letting loose the energy it was sworn to contained. Taking it upon herself to end the threat so the wild magical portals did not swallow up the Earth in their violent tearing open, she found the leader of the Order of the Titans, and offered her services. She was introduced to the greatest secrets of Asseria, such as the fictional Antagonist they invented to keep the Gods from purely bickering and the sacrifice of the original creator, the Lion, to contain the Six.

Armed with this new knowledge, Valeriana began to fix what she could of the problems the wild magical outbreaks were causing, her temporal powers taking the problems and removing the damage they had done to the fate of the realm. Eventually, this potent interruption attracted the attention of the suspected mastermind of this monumental unbalance, the Drake itself. On multihued wings it flew down to the purple-robed woman with her intense green eyes and flowing red locks, and as it landed, it changed- changed into a woman that looked so similar to Valeriana, though she wore dress less appropriate for a mage and more for a courtesan. A shock of recognition hit Card Trick, from her earliest memories- this was her mother, thought dead or disappeared so long ago. Shocked into stunned silence, the Drake explained she had been watching her daughter for all this time, influencing her life, arranging all the heartache and tragedy to develop her to this moment in time- when she felt she was ready.

The truth hit home. This woman had killed her sisters, and her first husband. She had allowed Valeriana an illusion of freedom when really everything was guided by the invisible hand of this cosmic manipulator. She asked her newly-reappeared mother one thing- why. The magical goddess merely laughed, and told her that it was time they came to rule together- that Valeriana and her were fated to have power over the cosmos itself, that she too knew the truth of the lie at Asseria's core, and it was their turn- as the ones with the knowledge- to take the reigns. Little did she know that she had made one fatal error. She had molded Valeriana into this perfect, calm sorceress with some fundamental power over the universe itself, and made her advance so, so far as a person- but Valeriana still remembered one thing, the look in the eyes of the most good-natured, harmless woman she'd ever met as her lifeblood spilled onto the floor of the cave, of Aemiliana's dying croak as she died innocent and pure.

To destroy a goddess is no easy feat, but she managed it. In one fell swoop of repressed grief, Valeriana gathered up every memory she had of the family this stranger had murdered, and created a single, concentrated point of light- a white hole, a magical singularity of such intense power that not even the plane's greatest puppet master could escape its pull. She thrust it into her mother's heart, then let it burst, making the Drake's spirit feel every ounce of suffering that Valeriana had gone through, the cries of the Crone and Cassandra as she died, the wailing of the amateur witch hunters she had murdered so much later out of revenge, the fear of her brave Lion as the demoness advanced upon her, the wordless anguish of the dying as she tended them on the battlefield. It was too much. The Drake look up to the sky, her eyes and mouth agape in a silent yell of sorrow, and then the Drake faded, destroyed by the pain she herself had inflicted, and silence fell over the field.

With the destruction of one of Asseria's primal avatars, the problems of uncontrolled magic only got worse. Realising what must be done, Valeriana entered the spirit of the Drake's world of the Dreamscape, and sifted her way through the utopian landscape before she met the being itself, and offered her her own form as a new host to the Shuddering Deeps, a being of primordial forbidden knowledge and one of the original six Devourers of this Hod realm of Asseria. Unable to act at all since its prisons' destruction, the Deeps realised its only options were to unify to another being, or flail impotent in this realm until the end of time. So, it took Valeriana up on her offer, and they joined, becoming one. Armed with the dangerous esoteric secrets of the Deeps, she is hardly the deity her mother was- for her mother was designed to contain and exploit the Deeps, whereas Valeriana is merely a mortal risen to the challenge- but she still ranks as one of the most potent beings of human descent on Earth. As the Shuddering Queen, she has become that much less moral... only time will tell if this once-protector shall ultimately turn out to be one of the great threats to the realm that she once swore to destroy.