Valyria Lar

Before the Worm Cult, before Coldharbour, before the name Lar meant anything to anyone, there was just Valyria. A Dunmer. A vampire. Age unknown, origin unknown, and she preferred it that way. She had been turned long enough to stop panicking about it, but not so long that feeding had become boring. She killed when she needed to and didn't lose sleep over it. She kept to herself, the way vampires do when they have learned the hard way that other people are mostly a liability.

What little is known of her mortal life she has never shared. Clan Lar's archives record only this: she was already a vampire when the Worm Cult took her, and she was not taken easily.

Mannimarco sacrificed her personally. That detail is in the Archive - she made sure of it. She was not chosen for any grand reason. She was convenient. The Worm Cult harvested souls across Tamriel to fuel Molag Bal's Planemeld, and Valyria was simply one more body fed to the machine. They ripped her soul out and cast her into the Wailing Prison - a slab of black stone and suffering suspended in Coldharbour's void. Her body was rebuilt from Azure Plasm and chaotic creatia. A Daedric imitation of what she had been. Without a soul she should have been hollow. Instead she felt stripped clean. Cold. Clear. Nothing left but teeth and purpose.

A blind old man who called himself the Prophet contacted her inside. He spoke of prophecy and destiny. Valyria did not care. She wanted out. When the prisoners overpowered their Dremora guards, she moved through the revolt on vampire instinct sharpened by rage - draining guards where she could reach them, raising corpses where it served her, leaving nothing behind but ash and silence. She found Lyris Titanborn - a Nord, half-giant, built for exactly this kind of violence. Together with a mad soul-shriven knight named Cadwell, they reached the Prophet's cell. But the cell needed a soul to hold. Lyris traded herself for the old man's freedom without hesitation. Valyria and the Prophet rode a Dark Anchor's tether back to Nirn. She breathed mortal air for the first time in what felt like years.

They did not arrive in the same place. It took time to find each other again. When they did, the Prophet told her everything - how the Soulburst had happened, how the barriers between Nirn and Oblivion had been shattered by a failed ritual at the Temple of the One. He did not tell her his real name. Not yet. He said he needed time to devise a way to free Lyris from Coldharbour.

Valyria went back. She found Lyris in the Foundry of Woe - a place Molag Bal had designed to break her by making her relive her worst memories. Her regret. Her solitude. Her fear. Valyria walked through all of it beside her and dragged her out. The old man was grateful. Valyria was not doing it for him.

Then the Prophet told her the truth. He was Varen Aquilarios - the Emperor who had caused the Soulburst. The man whose failed ritual had opened the door for Molag Bal. He had been blinded, broken, tortured until he looked like a beggar. But he still knew how to end it. He needed the Amulet of Kings.

The Amulet was gone. Its last keeper - Sai Sahan, a Redguard Blademaster - had hidden it in the ruins of Sancre Tor and then been captured by Molag Bal's agents. To find him, they needed help. Abnur Tharn - Imperial Battlemage, political survivor, and the only Companion who had bent the knee to Mannimarco after the Soulburst - contacted them through the Orb of Discourse. He wanted out. He offered information in exchange for rescue.

Valyria and Lyris entered the Castle of the Worm to extract him. Valyria moved through Mannimarco's fortress the way only a vampire can - patient, quiet, perfectly comfortable in the dark. She turned his own undead servants against him when the chance arose. When Mannimarco himself appeared and tried to kill them, Tharn fought him in a duel of magic that Valyria ended by breaking Mannimarco's concentration with a strike from the shadows. The Prophet opened a portal. They escaped. Tharn did not know Sai Sahan's exact location, but he was willing to help find it.

Through the Orb they learned Sahan was in the Halls of Torment - one of the worst places in Coldharbour, purpose-built for suffering. A Xivilai called the Duchess of Anguish was using illusions of the Five Companions to torture Sahan physically and mentally, trying to force the Amulet's location from him. Valyria killed the doppelgangers, killed the Duchess, and brought Sahan out. He told them the Amulet was hidden in Sancre Tor, but that they would need the Ring of Stendarr's Mercy to unlock the chamber.

The Ring was held by Kasura, Sahan's old mentor, in the Abbey of Blades in Hammerfell. They arrived to find a Daedric Titan had already destroyed most of the Abbey and killed most of the students. They slew the Titan, recovered the Ring from the ancestral crypt - where Mannimarco's ghost raised the dead to stop them - and pressed on to Sancre Tor.

Inside the ruins, Mannimarco was waiting. Not as a ghost this time. He revealed that he had tracked Sahan's every movement, and that he planned to use the Amulet to trap Molag Bal and absorb the Prince's essence - to become the next Daedric Prince of Domination himself. The Companions fought through the ruins and reached the Amulet chamber. Valyria killed Mannimarco where he stood. Molag Bal appeared the instant the necromancer fell and dragged his soul into Coldharbour - he had known about the betrayal all along. The Amulet of Kings was recovered. The path to ending the Planemeld was open.

The Amulet could end the Planemeld, but only if someone carried its power into Molag Bal's own domain. The ritual required a sacrifice - one of the Companions had to give their soul to imbue the Amulet with divine force. All three volunteered. The choice would be made when the time came.

First, there was the matter of getting to Coldharbour. Vanus Galerion of the Mages Guild and Countess Hakruba of the Fighters Guild assembled an invasion force on the island of Stirk, off the coast of Cyrodiil. The three alliance leaders - Emeric, Ayrenn, Jorunn - were invited to contribute troops. The negotiations collapsed before they started. The leaders argued, insulted each other, and Molag Bal sent Daedra to attack the island mid-summit. The alliances would not commit. The Guilds went alone. Valyria went with them.

Molag Bal's defences shattered the invasion the moment they crossed over. The force was scattered across Coldharbour in pieces. Valyria came through alone, as she often did, and found the Hollow City - Meridia's ancient sanctuary, hidden in the heart of enemy territory since before the Ayleids fell. She gathered the broken remnants of the Guild forces. She freed King Laloriaran Dynar from centuries of captivity. She destroyed the Black Forge where Dark Anchors were manufactured. When Vanus Galerion was captured attempting to dismantle the Great Shackle, she went in and extracted him. By then the Shackle had already spawned a Planar Vortex - a maelstrom dragging Nirn into Coldharbour. The only path left was through it.

Meridia carried her to the Colored Rooms and restored her soul. Molag Bal appeared briefly - calm, amused, impressed - and from him, that was more threat than praise. He told her she had drawn the gaze of forces beyond his dominion, forces that stirred in the spaces between the Princes' realms. Meridia dismissed him. She told Valyria that Abnur Tharn had fled with the Amulet of Kings during the ritual. He would never unlock its power, she said. But he would spend a great many years trying.

Valyria returned to Nirn carrying something no vampire had ever borne. The Blood Scion was not a temporary form. It was her now - her true, ascended state. The mortal face she had worn before Heart's Grief became the mask, and the Scion the truth beneath it. She could still assume the old appearance - the dark eyes, the sharp features, the composure - but it was a glamour. A courtesy extended to those who could not bear the sight of what she had become.

There was no return to her old life. A Bastion in Blackreach was waiting - ancient, half-ruined, pulling at her with a gravity she recognised as Sanguine's hand. Valyria was older than the fortress, older than the clan that would grow within it, older than most of the ruins she had ever walked. She claimed the Bastion and breathed life into it. Patched walls, lit braziers, filled the Crimson Hall with warmth and the scent of bloodwine. Over the years, others came. Vampires drawn by rumour or by something they could not name, who found in Valyria what they had not known they sought - a lord who did not demand submission but offered a seat at the table. Clan Lar took root among the restored walls, and Valyria ruled the only way she knew: at the head of a table that never emptied, in a hall where the wine never ran dry and the night never broke.

The Scarlet Archive became her obsession. Every artifact, every stolen scroll - catalogued by one who understood that memory is the only wealth a vampire can carry past death. She recorded everything. Including her own history, set down in her own hand, in ink the colour of old blood.