So with permission from esteemed grandmaster of gaming DZA, I'm going to give you yet another Valoth info piece.
Valoth's Secret
Valoth Hrandbon is the greatest of the draconic Champions, slayer of the Blind, and survivor of the Abomination. To many, he is a hero. To others, simply a soldier. However, in truth he is far more than that. His tale stretches back millennia, his life the culmination of thousands of years of planning.
Valoth's story begins with the highest of dragonkind, the pinnacle of the species: the Ascended. They were the eventual fate of any dragon that lived long enough; immortal, all powerful, all-knowing. Nothing could best them at such an ancient age.
Nothing, of course, save the Abomination. For no matter how powerful the Ascended became they were still rooted in reality, born of flesh and blood, while the Abomination was something ... other. They sensed it more than a million years before it arrived, it's approach battering their universe like a fierce black storm set to consume the stars themselves, and they knew from the outset that they were powerless against it, and neither could they flee, for it had been their power that had brought it to them and it would follow that power wherever it went. Desperate for a solution to this inevitable doom, they cast their gaze into the future for nigh on ten thousand years, searching among the myriad possibilities for an escape. The majority of futures they found were grim or dead, they and their reality devoured. However, they happened on one particular sequence of events that had their survival in its future. It would cost much, and be nigh impossible to pull off, but they took that chance all the same. It was all they had.
Reaching out with strands of power to the planet below, the Ascended altered time and edited in several sentient species to the past several million years of history. They were lesser to the dragons, shorter lived, but bred faster, and were lacking in psychic ability. To the dragons they were a regular part of life - after all, they'd been there for the last several million years. Then, with their initial phase done, the Ascended did the only thing they could do - they waited and watched their kin and the creatures they had made, hoping upon hope that the one they had seen would come.
They waited half a million years before the prophesied one came around.
Valoth.
They became aware of him as soon as he was conceived, and saw that without their intervention he would grow to be the leader of a prosperous tribe of humans, more advanced than any that came before. His leadership would spark the development of technology, and his descendants would eventually clash in a great war with the dragons. But all this was naught to be; they had greater designs for him. At the age of 5, when he and his family group were in dragon territory, gathering food, they manifested themselves in draconic form and snatched him away from his old life. They dropped him, screaming, in a deserted cave and gave him true thought, as well as activated his dormant psychic abilities, which the leaders had developed via exposure to dragons over millennia. After a period of several years, they led him out of the place which had become his home and to greater dragon society.
To war.
The Wyrm War, or the War of the Blind as some call it, was a very traumatic event in draconic history. Those who endured it remember it as a wailing clash between two subspecies of dragon, scrabbling for dominance. However, it was no accident.
The Abomination, as it approaches a universe, has the effect of disrupting the natural order of things. The dead rise and walk, up becomes down, rain becomes poisonous and acidic.
In the dragon's case, it stole the psychics of a significant number of hatchlings while still in the shell. Normally the afflicted ones would've died, but they survived by some trick of fate. This happened sporadically over the generations, until there was a sizable fifth of the population that was made up of nonpsychic dragons. From there events proceeded as detailed in the Wyrm War. The Ascendants were understandably distressed at this development, but were willing to take advantage of the conflict. They ensured that Valoth was made a champion and sent out to fight the Wyrms in order to further his psychic ability, for the Wyrms and their kin were partially resistant to psychics, and fought beside him in the form of Alkus for many years. The time of the plan's proceeding was coming close, and Valoth needed to be strong if it was to succeed.
Finally the day arrived. Valoth and the other draconic champions had made heavy incursions against the blind horde, but that was to pale before the coming storm. As the war had dragged on, the Wyrms had become ever more effected by the approaching presence of the Abomination. Ever more resistant to psychics they became, and they bred more every day. Finally the Abomination reached some sufficient distance from the fragile shell of their reality that they underwent their full transformation. At last they became affected enough by the Abomination's approach that their essence reached through the universal veil and contacted that of the Abomination ... and became one with it. They became the first of the Vanguards for their reality, a heaving crawling mass of flesh, scale and bone that quickly expanded and multiplied beyond the confines of the cavern system the former Wyrms resided in. They quickly abandoned the confining system and took to the skies. There they spread unnaturally quickly, blotting out the sun from their sheer numbers all across the planet in less than a day. Then they began descending.
The dragons had no idea what had hit them. They were swarmed by the sheer mass of the vanguard, several dragons being literally crushed beneath the sheer weight of the horde. So they fell back, into specially designed caverns in the highest mountains that were only to be entered should the welfare of the very species be at risk. Every live dragon and Champion somehow fit in those caves, from Elder to hatchling. And with extinction knocking at their door, they did the thing some Elders had begun contemplating some centuries ago, the concept that the Ascended had placed into their minds: interplanetary travel. For all their power, the dragons did not comprehend that they faced merely the death of their planet, but their reality, so their solution was to travel to a different one. The Elder that was known at the time as the First Scale had been watching the stars for millennia and had located a suitable planet. All that was needed was the raw power to teleport there. So they engaged in a mind meld, every one of them, Champions and dragons both, and pooled their power to make the jump. However, they would need time to charge up, so to speak. Time they did not have, for the vanguard had found the caves. The doors, reinforced as they were would not hold out for long against them, for reality seemed to decay and crumble around them. It was decided that a holding force was necessary in order for the species to escape. Therefore some dragons broke themselves off the link in order to delay the vanguard long enough for the rest to escape. One of these dragons was Alkus. The vanguard was delayed by these brave dragons, for a time. But they could not hold out for long, and just before the collective had charged up enough energy to jump, Alkus was slain by an insectile beast. Seeing this, Valoth became mad with grief, and now the Ascended acted. Disengaging from their mortal shell with godlike swiftness, they swept into Valoth's exposed mind, destroying his personality in the process. They burrowed themselves deep within his subconscious, down where they would never be found, and rebuilt his personality on top of the ruin of his mind. Then they lent him part of their power as his grief ripped through the psionic bond and tore a hole between universes.
It had to be done this way. The Ascended could not run, for the Abomination would follow their power. But they could hide, encase themselves deep within a mortal shell and wait until it was safe to re-emerge. But if they hid in a dragon, or anything crafted by them, or their inner light would shine out from within and they would be found. They needed a mortal not crafted by their hand, yet possessed of psionic ability in order to make a suitable host. So they created lesser beings than their draconic kin and let them sit for millennia in order to dispel the traces of their power that clung to them. From there it was simply a matter of choosing the greatest of the lot and hiding inside them until they could re-emerge. It would give them time to study what they glimpsed of the Abomination, perhaps to find a weakness.
Valoth knows not of this secret of his, but he grows in psychics every day. Sometime he will be strong enough for the Ascended to reemerge from his subconscious. No one knows what will occur then.
At this rate I'm wondering if playing as Valoth would be more worthwhile what with the ridiculous amounts of backstory he has.
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Topic: Slaves to DZA: Miscellaneous Chitchat Thread (Read 126159 times)