Disclaimer: I don't own Slayers; I certainly don't own Valgaav... Valgarv... Valgaarv... Valterria... Val Agares... Valterria Agares... How the hell many names does
this guy have? Whatever. I don't own him; I haven't
even seen all of Slayers: TRY yet, and even if he wasn't owned by a bunch of
corporate peoples, there's a horde and a half of rabid (and, I suppose, some
not-so-rabid) Fangirls (and, I suppose, Fanboys) who
are ahead of me in line for Valgaav Ownership. Not to
mention Gaav or his remains. The Ideas presented in
this fic are by and large not purely my own, they are one take on the general fan consensus (as I see
it) on what happens to The Entity Heretoforward Known
As Val after TRY.
Val
He was not Valgaav. Valgaav
was a Mazoku beholden to Lord Gaav, the Chaos Dragon;
he was obsessed with avenging his fallen master, and not rational enough even
to realize that it had been the Hellmaster, Phibrizzo, and not Lina Inverse,
who had ruined the one he wished to avenge. He now accepted this fact, and,
while he would have preferred to have destroyed Phibrizzo himself, he bore no
ill will to Lina, who had done it; he understood and respected her reasons. Valgaav was also obsessed with his desire to visit
retribution on the Golden Dragons for the Genocide of the race of the Ancient
Dragons, to which he had once belonged; his rage and obsession caused him to
believe that returning Genocide on them in kind was a Just course of action for
the achievement of this goal. The current Him could hardly hate the Golden
Dragons; one of them had raised him from his second egg, and done so with
enough Love and Kindness that he knew they couldn't be all bad.
He was also not Valterria Agares.
Valterria was a Black Ancient Dragon from long ago.
He had hated the Golden Dragons as well, by the time he died; he hated them
enough that he had accepted an alliance with the Mazoku, his next greatest
hate, that he might live to destroy them. His present self hated neither
Dragons nor Mazoku; having been both, he was now neither, precisely, though he
had much in common with each. Valterria was doubly
dead, a victim first of an unjust purge by the fearful Golden Dragon lords, and
then of his own desire for revenge: The first had ruined his body; the second,
his soul. Since that day over a thousand years ago there had been material
proof that he was no longer Valterria: The horn that
had stood proud on Valgaav's forehead, and remained
to this day on the one that Valgaav had, in a sense,
fathered.
For Valgaav was also thoroughly dead. That
entity had been destroyed as soon as the monstrosity that was the mutant fusion
of Dark Star Dugradigdo and Night Dragon Volphied had taken control; he had been a victim of the
lust for destruction that had evolved from the initial desire for revenge.
However, when that entity had been... undone, some benevolent entity, probably
the last vestiges of the will of the Night Dragon, but possibly the Lord of
Nightmares Herself, had decided to give the troubled soul another chance. And
so, the entity had been given his Third Life, as an Egg given from the heavens
into the hands of one that would care for him.
What, exactly, he was in this third life was still something of a
mystery to him. He had the ability to change into the same draconic hybrid form
that Valgaav had, as well as the full-dragon form,
like Valterria's, in which he had hatched from his
second egg; however, he was most comfortable in his humanoid form. He still had
the catlike pupils of a Mazoku, and, between that and
his preference for his human form, could easily pass for one. However, he did
not derive sustenance from negative spiritual energy, nor did positive emotions
poison him. He lived off food and magic, the latter in much the same way plants
live off sugar: he, like the dragons, manufactured all he needed. Furthermore,
his growth rate so far had been more like that of a human than anything else-
he had not matured at the sometimes maddeningly slow rate of the Dragons, who
took half a millennium to reach maturity; nor had he been born fully grown, as
almost all Mazoku were created. How much of this involved his being a third
rather than a first life he did not pretend to know.
Mentally, he had never been better adjusted. Valterria
had been arrogant and haughty in the beginning and desperately mad at the end; Valgaav had had mental problems that would have made any
psychiatrist to attempt to treat him a very rich man. The one who he now was,
who was born of the two, had grown up in a mostly home, with a Golden Dragon
Ex-Priestess who had helped kill him in his previous incarnation for his loving
mother, attended by two loyal servants, a clever-but-bomb-happy fox-man and a
massively strong lizard-ogre whose lives he had saved in the same previous
incarnation, and occasionally visited by the sort of uncle figure of the
quirky, insanely powerful Priest-General of Zelas-Metallium,
the Greater Beast. Normal, no, but happy.
He was, as far as he knew, unique; there was no one else in the world
who could relate to everything he was and had been. But that didn't bother him.
He knew who he was.
He was Val.
Author's Note: As I mentioned, I've not seen all of TRY yet; So
I would greatly appreciate it if you, the conscientious reader, would point out
any errors. Of course, other feedback is also appreciated.
1) I am well aware that the name Valterria was
never actually used, and that it is the result of an error in an early fansub, I discovered that much in my preliminary research.*
However, while I would normally avoid using something like that, I kept it for
two reasons: One, it is a popular name among fans (that's also why it's in the
disclaimer), and Two, The last line really wouldn't work if I'd been referring
to one of the former hims as 'Val' throughout. You'll
also notice I kept the 'Agares' Part, which is official, as far as I know.
2) I am unsure, but I believe Chibi-Val was shown without his horn at
the end of TRY. I assumed, for the purposes of this Fic, that it grew back
sometime later- this is the reflection of an older (say, late teens) Val, after
all.
3) Also, Val as I picture him here doesn't have Valgaav's
scar-like markings on his face, and wears his hair more like Valterria than Valgaav- that is,
longer and more down.
* I never write anything without knowing something about it first, so I
read up on Valgaav.