Valerius is a gaunt Aasimar with skin like cooling volcanic ash and jet-black hair tied back with cord. His eyes are milky white spheres that emit a soft, ghostly glow. He wears charcoal scouting leathers that are frayed at the edges.

Quiet and intensely observant, Valerius speaks only when necessary. He finds more comfort in the shifting shadows of the woods than the bright, crowded halls of a city. He treats silence as a sacred space for reflection.

Valerius was abandoned at the Sanctuary of Eternal Radiance by a mother lost to void-born madness. As a sect of Aasimar fundamentalists who worshipped absolute light, the monks viewed his necrotic spark as a divine corruption. While other acolytes performed rituals in the sun, he was sent into the dark peripheries as a scout, tasked with monitoring the borders of their isolation. Only Sister Elara, a blind gardener, taught him that light and shadow are inseparable. One morning, Valerius returned from a perimeter patrol to find the monastery perfectly silent. The gates were open and the grounds were undisturbed, but the inhabitants had vanished, leaving only their robes in heaps on the floor. Now a survivor of a lost sanctuary, he travels the world trying to find where the light ended and he began.