User:Joshmaul/Valkia'jin

"'My people say I defy da spirits. I say no, I follow dem...'"
 * - Valkia'jin the Spiritseeker

Valkia'jin - Valkia for short - was a shaman of the Zandalari who followed the Prophet Zul in his effort to unite the troll nations of Azeroth following the Cataclysm, believing that Zandalar would be consumed by the disaster. Yet during the war for Pandaria, she experienced a crisis of faith that led her to murder her own father, an aged yet powerful Zandalari warlord, and seek asylum with the Darkspear tribe - the only trolls who stood against Zul's plan. With Zandalar opened up to foreign travel, Valkia was banished to the deserts of Vol'dun by General Jakra'zet for the killing of her father... yet she has allowed her experience in the harsh wastes to strengthen her in both body and soul.

Biography
Valkia was born in Zuldazar, the daughter of a powerful Zandalari prelate (paladin) and warlord named Zul'kor. Though she did not have her father's attunement to the Light (embodied in Rezan, the Loa of kings), she did possess a connection to the elemental spirits. She trained early on to combine physical strength and elemental fury, making her a force to be reckoned with in battle, and invoked the raptor Loa Gonk, Lord of the Hunt, in her spirit form as well as in the feral spirits she summoned in battle. In time, she became known as Valkia'jin, establishing her as an honored elder shaman.

During her early training, however, she experienced a vision of a two-fold fall of the Zandalari Empire, first at the hands of the elements, and then at the hands of the Zandalari people themselves. However, she did not share this aloud with her aging but still vital father, who believed fully in the vision that Zul, the Prophet to King Rastakhan and head of the Zanchuli Council, had shared: The Cataclysm was coming and would destroy all of Zandalar, and only by reuniting the tribes under the banner of the Zandalari would troll-kind survive the coming storm. Rastakhan was not convinced to evacuate Zandalar, but allowed Zul and anyone who wished to follow him to take the fleet and set out on the Great Sea. Thus Valkia left with Zul'kor and his warriors to join Zul's crusade, travelling to the Eastern Kingdoms as part of the effort to revitalize the dying Amani and Gurubashi Empires. She accompanied Zul'kor to Zul'Aman in southern Quel'Thalas, where the Zandalari had installed the warlord Daakara to replace the fallen hero Zul'jin, who had been slain by the Horde he had once served. Yet even as she worked to help the Amani, Valkia had immense doubts about the war. While the Cataclysm had brought about the first part of her vision, she wondered what would bring about the second - that the Zandalari themselves would be a major contributor to their own downfall.

The Sound of Thunder


That answer, or so it seemed to her, would come when the survivors of the Zandalari incursion into the Eastern Kingdoms - those who were not slaughtered by the Alliance and the Horde, who rallied to the Darkspear chieftain Vol'jin to prevent the Zandalari takeover - were called to the recently-rediscovered lands of Pandaria. Millennia earlier, when Zandalar and Pandaria had all been part of the supercontinent of Kalimdor, the Zandalari under the leadership of the great Zulathra had allied themselves with the mogu empire under the rule of Lei Shen, a bloodthirsty and unyielding tyrant better known as the Thunder King. Not trusting a mogu to bring about his return if he were to fall, Lei Shen had entrusted the secrets of his resurrection to the Zandalari. Zul's followers fulfilled the ancient pact, retrieving the Thunder King's remains from his tomb in the Kun-Lai mountains and conducting the ancient ritual to resurrect him. With Lei Shen returned, the bulk of the Zandalari forces and their allies - the survivors of the Farraki, Drakkari, Gurubashi, and Amani - relocated to his palace on the Isle of Thunder.

Though she believed in preserving the empire to which she had dedicated her life, Valkia experienced a crisis of faith during the Pandaria conflict, as she witnessed the cold-blooded slaughter of innocent pandaren and the brave warriors who had rallied to protect them in Kun-Lai's Zouchin Province, when the Thunder King was resurrected. Having lived in a grand city of gold back in Zandalar, she began to tire of the bloodshed and questioned how an empire built on blood and bones could endure. Her despondency did not go unnoticed by her father, coming to a head when the Shado-Pan led the champions of Azeroth in a siege of Lei Shen's fortress. Zul'kor was enraged when Valkia outright asked him if following Zul had been the correct path after all, or if he planned to lead those who followed him to their doom. Blinded by loyalty to Zul's vision of a grand troll empire, Zul'kor threatened to deliver his only daughter's head to Zul in person. Seeing no option left to her, Valkia - being younger and faster than the aged Zul'kor - snatched the ornate warhammer he carried out of his hand and slew her father on the spot with a single blow.

The Long Way Home
Lei Shen and most of the leadership of the Zandalari in Pandaria were slaughtered soon afterward, bringing an end to the threat of the resurgent mogu empire. Valkia fled from the palace of the Thunder King on the back of a quilen taken from the imperial stables. Realizing she could not run forever and would eventually be killed without a second thought, she took a risk and surrendered herself to the most unlikely people, yet at the same time the people most likely to hear her out: The Darkspear tribe. She renounced Zul's plot and the part she had played in it, and put herself at their mercy - knowing that the spirits would be her ultimate judge, if the Darkspear decided to kill her. To her surprise, they elected to spare her, and she exiled herself into the wilderness, wandering the greater world for a time while maintaining a home in the mountain caves of Kun-Lai. There she remained until the Legion assaulted the nearby Peak of Serenity, destroying the pandaren monastery there. Guided by the spirits once again, she answered the call of the Earthen Ring in the Broken Isles, and followed the Armies of Legionfall on the broken world of Argus.

After the defeat of the Legion, Valkia learned to her astonishment that Zandalar - though damaged - had survived the Cataclysm, and knew that the time to return and face her people's judgment had come. She thus travelled by ship from the Echo Isles to the Port of Zandalar, accompanied by the Forsaken shadow priest Shankolin Blightpath. While the undead priest was (reluctantly) allowed to remain, Valkia was arrested by the Zanchuli Council, which to her dismay remained under the direction of Zul. The first thing they did, as a gesture of humiliation, was to take her totems from her and smash them to pieces in front of her - the ultimate insult for a shaman.

Exile to Vol'dun
As punishment for killing Zul'kor, General Jakra'zet sentenced Valkia to exile in the sands of Vol'dun, his favored punishment for "enemies of the state". Deciding to give her a "fighting chance", believing it would be little more than a weighted club in her hands now that her totems were broken, her tormentors allowed her to keep the hammer with which she had killed her father, as a reminder of her treason, before shipping her through the Prisoners' Pass into the desert. There, Valkia remained for months, seeking to reconnect to the elements in her harsh new home. She made a point of avoiding the exile "communities", as she felt her only crime was being gullible enough to follow a madman like Zul - who, just after she left, made his move to overthrow Rastakhan. Using the crafting skills she learned in Dalaran during the Legion war, Valkia used salvaged bits of stone from the ruins of the desert to craft new totems, and in time was able to summon a storm elemental to act as her mode of transport - to ride the winds to shelter, or to battle. She worked alongside vulpera caravans in exchange for whatever food could be spared, and soon became adjusted to the harsh environment in which she had to live.

Despite the dangers, Valkia remained unbowed, biding her time; even the exiles, she foresaw, would have a part to play in the future of the Zandalari Empire. That prediction came true when she received a visitor in the sands near Atul'Aman, a blood elf mage named Menarian Talashar. He told her of Rastakhan's death at the hands of the Alliance, the destruction of the fleet, and the increasing brutality and madness of Sylvanas Windrunner. She also learned that her people had formally aligned with the Horde in the wars to come, which heartened her; that meant the next time she would travel to the Echo Isles, she would do so as a comrade rather than as a refugee. With an amnesty from the new monarch, Queen Talanji, Valkia returned to Zuldazar - and to the uncertain future that the Zandalari faced as part of the Horde.