Major Prime Victoria Haley is a warcaster of Cygnar and one of the most powerful arcanists in the history of Cygnar
History[]
Victoria Haley and her twin sister Gloria were born on 579 AR in Ingrane, a small fishing village on the western coast of Cygnar, north of Frog’s Bight. Her parents were humble folk who endured a hard existence to provide for the sisters but lived simple and happy lives.[1][2]
Asphyxious received prophetic intelligence from Cryxian agencies on the existence of a young warcaster and had sent an army of raiders under the Pirate Queen Skarre herself to abduct children with high sorcerous potential.[2] The girls were just five summers old in late spring of 584 AR when raiders from the Scharde Islands landed on Ingrane’s wooden docks. They charged into the peaceful village and met little resistance. The twins’ mother barely had enough time to push Victoria and Gloria through the cellar trapdoor before the Cryxian forces battered their way into the home. Through cracks in the floorboards, Victoria watched in horror as her mother was murdered. She huddled frozen in a lightless corner as the raiders wrenched the trapdoor open and dragged Gloria whimpering from the cellar.[1]
Nothing but dark memories and restless spirits dwell in the ruins of Ingrane. Now the village is a place of shadowy things, and icy winds howl down from the high bluffs to scrape across the necks of travelers and sailors who venture too near. The few survivors of that night gathered what they could of their old lives and made the voyage through moors and woods to the larger nearby town of Ramarck. Victoria Haley was fostered at a nearby Morrowan abbey; though she was not treated unkindly there, the sisters of the order did their best to curb her budding arcane power, believing it was unhealthy. At thirteen summers Victoria fled the school, made her way to New Larkholm, and found employ as a fishmonger’s assistant. It was while in the proximity of a laboring steamjack on the docks that her warcaster talents manifested and she caught the eye of military recruiters. In the army her latent power was ultimately fostered and unleashed like water rushing through a broken dam.[1]
Captain Haley[]
Captain Haley armed with her Vortex spear calling forth her powers
Victoria entered directly into warcaster and officer training 597 AR in the Strategic Academy in Caspia and began her Journeyman tour in 598 AR under Allister Caine for two weeks 2 weeks only to be aborted and redirected to serve under Commander Adept Sebastian Nemo and under him the tour concluded in half the usual time.[2]
In 599 AR, she finished her arcane training and was promoted to Captain. She joined the ranks of the Cygnaran Army as a powerful warrior and a determined warcaster even at the age of twenty. Assigned to the Third Army she conducted 60 successful patrols alongside different elements of the Third from 599-603 AR. and engaged in combat with Cryxian forces on 24 occasions.[1][2]
Under Commander Adept Nemo’s orders she was transferred to the First Army in 603 AR to serve under Commander Coleman Stryker. During which she conducted 11 patrols, including four escort missions to the Llaelese border. During the fourth escort mission she encountered a Khadoran warcaster subsequently identified as Kommander Sorscha Kratikoff. She engaged Khadoran patrols in minor skirmishes on 3 other occasions preceding the war, including joining Commander Stryker and Lieutenant Allister Caine for a successful attack on Khadoran Supply Base #17 in Goloven, 604 AR. [2]
Captain Victoria Haley has a furious loathing for anything Cryxian. Where the armies of the Nightmare Empire assemble she is often found throwing everything she can muster toward the undead hordes. She attracted the attention of the warwitch Deneghra long before learning her true identity, and the two seem hellbent on mutual destruction. Where Haley moves, Deneghra maneuvers to counter, and more than once their forces have collided in bloody conflict.[1]
Major Victoria Haley[]
Victoria's powers, specially of temporal manipulation continued to grow and she wields the time’s flux like a weapon by unleashing a torrent of conflicting temporal energies to shred enemies apart.
Haley promoted to major displaying her prosthetic arm with the Spear Echo
Within the barbed groves of the Thornwood, after years of inconclusive duels, the warwitch Deneghra assailed Haley with a pentup fury of hatred and cruelty. Haley’s malevolent twin sought to end her life and consume her soul. Faltering under Deneghra’s onslaught, Haley fell, pushed to the edge of defeat. Near death and with one arm ruined, Haley forced her mind to rupture the glyphs, locks, and arcane sigils securing the cortex of Deneghra’s helljack. She turned the might of the Cryxian Slayer upon her wicked twin, ordering the foul machine to hold Deneghra fast. Then Haley struck, tearing the warwitch in half with her spear and instantly ending her life. Never before and never since has a warcaster been able to so completely wrest the control of a warjack from another.[1]
Victoria still bears physical and mental scars from this battle. Her arm was ripped from her body during her fight with the warwitch, and even the finest of military surgeons could not save it. Instead her arm was replaced with a mechanikal prosthetic. Soon after she was promoted to the position of Major.[1][2]
She met her sister again at the Battle of the Temple Garrodh, during which Haley witnessed Deneghra had been transformed into a wraithlike creature by Asphyxious. This confrontation left no clear victor, but subsequently Haley was at last able to grieve the child she remembered as her sister, and for a time she considered that part of her heart safely sealed.[1]
Haley fought alongside Sebastian Nemo to keep the Khadorans at bay during the First and Second battles for Northguard where she was noted for acts of conspicuous gallantry and valor, but in the end the Khadoran onslaught proved impossible to stop.It was in the Thornwood after the fall of Northguard that Haley saw her twin again. This latest meeting opened wounds Haley thought were healed, particularly when her sister did not attack her as expected. Deneghra came upon Haley when she was separated from the rest of her forces and surrounded by Khadorans. Deneghra saved her life and then offered Haley her freedom. She professed to feel the renewal of long-buried sisterly affections and declared their antagonism at an end.[1]
However Haley distrusts Deneghra completely, and the encounter greatly unsettled her. She could not fathom her sister connecting in death to emotions she clearly lacked in life, but Deneghra’s true goals remained a mystery. Even as Haley tried to concentrate on the defense of Cygnar’s northern border, she was aware of the unfinished business between the two. As her arcane power grows with each passing battle, she realized that she must unleash her full potential to earn a decisive and overwhelming victory for Cygnar.[3]
Major Prime Victoria Haley[]
In the fall of 608 AR Deneghra reappeared and warned Victoria of the upcoming Khadoran assault and an assassination attempt on Nemo by Cryxian assassins. When Victoria questioned if Deneghra was responsible she did not deny it but Deneghra became incorporeal before she could attack in anger and left. Haley intending to save her mentor soon left for Corvis resulting in her missing the Khadoran attack as well as the Cryxian attack that followed.[4]
The blade was coated with a poison designed to neutralize an arcanist’s magic, and the alchemical solution thrived on the font of her power, becoming a lingering toxin ravaging her body and threatening to end her life if she drew on her powers. The complete deprivation of her arcane potential and warcaster abilities led to a loss of identity for the woman who had come to be defined by them. Since her teenage years it had been Haley’s magic that had given her freedom and opened up new opportunities, and it was as a warcaster that she had discovered a sense of her life’s purpose. The military has been her home and family since her power was first discovered, and this illness left her feeling useless and irrelevant. This period proved to be one of the hardest trials of Haley’s life, particularly when the affliction was determined to be both incurable and inevitably fatal.[3]
Haley Prime summoning ghosts of her future and past selves to fight alongside her
With her death nearing, the Convergence of Cyriss offered to transfer her mind and soul into an artificial body, anticipating her eventual conversion to their beliefs. However Haley found that she could not overlook her deeper philosophical concerns. After considerable soul-searching and a difficult conversation with Sebastian Nemo, she ultimately rejected the machine cult’s offer, choosing to retain her humanity even though it would bring about her demise and sought to compose herself to face death on her own terms. Haley’s time came soon. As her soul departed her body and pass into Urcaen, her essence reconnected with the source of her power. Freed from the agonies and limitations of the flesh, she felt a joyous realization that her end was not necessarily irreversible. She awakened to her full, unfettered potential. Amid this moment of arcane enlightenment, the threads of fate revealed themselves to her, extending as an infinite web both forward and backward in time. In this instant of clarity Haley seized these threads and manipulated them, summoning into the present echoes of herself from both past and future. By connecting with her own essence, she was able to summon a reflection of her former self and make it tangible, restoring her body. This not only erased the ravages of the poison but made her body whole, restoring the arm she had lost years before. Rejecting passage to the realm beyond life, her soul rejoined her body and she awoke, deeply changed and intimately aware of the fabric of reality around her. [3]
While she retains the ability to see and manipulate the streams of time, instinctively apprehending how they warp and change in response to the decisions of those around her. By combining her power with this perception, she can summon and conjure ghostly manifestations of her past and future selves to fight at her side. It is a mysterious ability even to her, accomplished as unconsciously as opening or closing her hand. They have access to a diverse arcane arsenal collected from across the span of Haley’s past and future lives and the trio can unleash a tempest of power while exploiting the fabric of time to achieve astonishing levels of coordinated destruction. She did not choose these specific echoes so much as discover them, finding they were the most tangible and ready to respond to her needs. Her past shows the willful and reckless youth that strides onto the field with unabashed confidence, a reminder of a time when Haley’s arcane potential had just emerged. This echo lacks the self-control to regulate her power, which surges forth explosively. Still angry from the death of her parents and rebelling against the suppression of her powers by those in charge of the Morrowan abbey that sought to raise her, the younger Victoria Haley embodies the defiant streak still present in the warcaster today. The future echo on the otherhand yields a side of her she does not fully understand or recognize, an enigma possessed of wisdom earned from many years of warfare and having confronted the consequences of wielding her vast powers. She is a daunting affirmation of the fact that the depth of Haley’s power remains unplumbed. How distant the future from which this echo travels is unclear, but her mere presence has disturbing cosmological implications regarding the nature of fate and free will.[3]
Haley’s ability of temporal manipulations is unprecedented and not even the Cygnar’s finest minds can grasp the fundamental principles at work. The exceptional nature of her powers prompted the Strategic Academy on Artificer General Nemo’s recommendation to grant Haley the arcane rank of Prime. This prestigious rank is awarded only to those operating well beyond the capability and power of other arcanists; only a few individuals have achieved it in the army’s history.[3]
Haley was glad to return to the front lines in order to wield her powers in support of her nation and those she holds dear and her ability to see the threads of fate allowed her to anticipate a dire threat to her nation. Major Haley joined Constance Blaize just in time to mitigate the devastation resulting from a clash between Toruk and his brood of dragons over the Wyrmwall Mountains in 609 AR, preventing the deaths of thousands.With her new abilities, Major Prime Victoria Haley is resolved to meet whatever dangers lie ahead for Cygnar with confidence and conviction.[3]