Valerius is unnervingly still when not working. He possesses the pale, porcelain skin of his elven heritage, sharpened by the gaunt features of a dhampir. His hair is a shock of white pulled back into a grease-stained knot. He wears leather aprons over fine scale mail, his fingers constantly twitching as if tightening invisible screws. His eyes are the color of oxidized copper.

He is intensely focused, often ignoring social cues or life-threatening dangers to inspect a curious piece of clockwork. He speaks in clipped, efficient sentences and views every obstacle as a puzzle with a mechanical solution.

Valerius was born into an elven household afflicted by a necrotic lineage. Rather than succumbing to the melancholy of his half-living state, he became obsessed with the permanence of metal and gears. He spent a century in the great iron-works of the north, where he discovered that the rhythmic clank of hammers could drown out his instinctive hunger. He was eventually exiled after a minor scandal involving the 'recycling' of several sacred guild relics to create a personal assistant. Valerius now travels the world as a freelance engineer. He views himself not as a vampire or an elf, but as a project in progress. He has spent years building and rebuilding his Steel Defender, a clockwork hound named Copper, which serves as the only being he truly trusts. To Valerius, biology is merely a series of design flaws waiting to be corrected by a sufficiently clever artisan.