Valera: Character Profile

"Ogres and mercenaries," muttered Valera. She looked with indescribable disgust at the motley band that had retreated from the fight at Kragg. She turned to the sole surviving Maradon soldier who stood beside her. "This is what they give me to fight with, ogres and mercenaries." The raven-haired Maradon captain couldn't bear to look at the ogre or the two mercenaries now that all but one of her own men were dead. Valera turned on her heel and stomped off through the trees to be alone and to think.

Valera, Captain of Maradon

That ogre was a damned sissy. Big as a house, dumb as a post, and the first to run away from a fight as soon as he gets the tiniest scratch. Some savage beast he was. And the Black Band mercenaries were hardly better. "Black Band." Sounded so dark, so menacing, so scary. Of the two she had remaining, the first had panicked and fled before he even engaged and the second, well, where the hell had he even come from? Probably had gotten separated from his own patrol somewhere and couldn't find his way home. Incompetent bunch of nits.

And what were they in it for anyway? The ogres? For blood and cruelty. The mercenaries? For money. Valera despised that. She was in this because she believed in it. She had seen too many children begging in the streets of Saint-Symall back in Maradon, children with dirty faces and swollen bellies, whose parents slaved in the copper and iron mines and still couldn't feed their families. Just one day, just one day's worth of mithril production could feed the whole city of Saint-Symall for a month. That's why she was here. That's why Maradon needed to win this war, why she was willing to kill and to die if necessary.

With a sigh Valera turned back to the clearing to gather up what was left of her warband. "Come on," she said. "We're heading to the keep for replacements."

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