Valeria A short history by Susan Van Camp

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Valeria was born to a tribe of Manilac taur herders way back 300 years before the Death Day bloodbath, in the days when dragons ruled every bit of land everywhere. She was a werewolf with a reputation as a berserker and a stubborn cuss. During a spirit dance she had a vision - She danced into the bonfire, standing in flames higher than her head while she called out the doom of dragons. She saw their holds empty, she saw their naked bones bleaching, she saw their blood. When the spirits left her she stepped out of the flames wearing the mark of her ancestors warning. Her brown coat had turned blood red. Other shape shifters had the vision but most didn’t have the guts to talk about it or go to the ancient dragons with the story. The dragons chased her away repeatedly, enemies who didn’t want the dragons to be warned stalked her. She was the only one smart enough to survive the telling of her vision and stubborn enough to keep telling it until someone listened. By that time Valeria, grown old bent and cunning, spent most of her days wandering the wilds. Playing a mad prophet, she convinced her enemies that she was harmless. At the same time she used spirits to send messages to her followers. She lived like a hermit, plotting and planning for the future, until she died alone in the wilds with only the dead for company. In honor of her sacrifice, her followers called themselves Valerian Champions from that time on.

Before Valeria, everyone had a place and kept to it Gargoyles tended clan monoliths. Unicorns and pegasai were priests in elven temples. Werewolves and tigreans ran with nomad tribes. Orcs stuck with their own kind, because most decent folks avoided them. Dragons holed up in their clan holds and lorded it over everyone else from a distance. No one cared about anyone else and no one questioned the way things were done. Then, here comes Valeria, howling about the death of the clans, predicting that all shape shifters would follow the dragons to an early grave. Deathday was coming and the reaper was going to cut down every shape shifter alive unless they did something they’d never done before. Unless the unified. They had to join together with other shifters, with mortal people, with the land itself or the storms would eat the world. This was heresy and most folks ignored Valeria or drove her away. Heresy was punishable by a terrible death. But some folks believed and formed a secret council of heretics. They were the first Valerians. These Valerian mages crafted a seeding spell. Before Valeria, few mortals gave birth to shape shifters. No matter what those ancient dragons said about living apart from impurity, they still got around and once in awhile a kid born to the mortal rabble turned out to be a dragon. That kind of thing’s been going on ever since dragons and mortals first met. Back then few mortals changed, the blood wasn’t strong enough in most to cause a change. The first Valerians knew they couldn’t stop Deathday but they could use the shifter blood in mortals and the Dragon storms Valeria predicted to create more shape shifters to fight the makers of the storms. The seeding spell is what causes about one in a hundred mortals to change during a Dragon storm. The Valerians survived by holing up in secret fortresses acting as hermit and mixing in with normal mortals. They train young shifters to fight back.

Deathday

The Pylos came to Grandilar through astral gates from another world. They taught some necromancers death magic and recruited them and others for the purpose of destroying the dragons and taking over this world. While the dragons celebrated deathday by sending their spirits into the astral plane to commune with their ancestors the clanholds were defended by only a few gargoyle stonemasons and werewolf warriors. They had no chance against an army of warp spawn led by necromancers, guided into the holds by vengeful dwarves (some of whom had helped build the holds). The necros killed the guards, captured the dragons then drained every ancient until it was a dried out husk. They created more warp in a single month than has been created in the two centuries since and spawned storms so big that some of them are still going strong today. The surviving dragons finally allied themselves with mortals and stopped the Pylos but at a great cost. The war continues today between the Valerians and the necromancers.