Alva Valai is not reckless. That is the part most players get wrong. They see the blood, the traps, and the soul engines humming in the dark, and they assume she is just another Wraeclastian thrill seeker chasing old power. Alva wants answers, not power. And when no one in Wraeclast will give her the truth, she decides to take the truth from time itself.
Her incursions serve one purpose. She is rebuilding the Temple of Atzoatl because she believes it holds the one secret that can explain the rise and fall of the Vaal.
And… she might be right.
Who Alva really is
If you do not follow the lore, here is the simplest way to understand her. Alva is a historian with a spine of steel. She studies civilizations that terrify everyone else. She digs through blood magic rituals and soul engines the same way other scholars read dusty scrolls. She is one of the only people in Wraeclast willing to say out loud that the Vaal were not monsters. They were brilliant. Dangerous. Flawed. But brilliant.
This makes her dangerous to the Templar version of history. It explains why she is willing to break the rules of time.
Why Atzoatl matters
The Temple of Atzoatl was the last great monument of the Vaal Empire. It was built as a utopia shaped by blood magic and ancient technology. It never became a utopia. It did become a machine. A living structure designed to perfect society by force. It was powered by souls. Controlled by rituals. Governed by the Omnitect, an artificial being that was half spirit and half machine.
Alva believes Atzoatl is the key to everything. If she can understand how it worked, she can understand why the Vaal fell. She can understand how a brilliant civilization collapsed under its own ambition.
The truth about incursions
The time manipulation is not just gameplay flavor. Alva is intentionally altering events inside the Temple’s past. She quietly admits that every choice the player makes rewires history. Kill the wrong architect and a room disappears. Create the right connection and new wings of the temple form in the present. Alva treats the past as something she can cut apart and reassemble until she gets the structure she needs.
She is building a working version of Atzoatl one incursion at a time. She wants the temple to stand exactly as the Vaal intended, so she can reach the apex that holds their greatest creation.
The apex and the Omnitect
This is the part she never says out loud. Alva is hunting knowledge locked inside the apex. The Vaal poured everything they had into that chamber. It was meant to prove they could control life, death, and society through a single engineered entity.
The Omnitect is the final evolution of Vaal technology. A soul powered hybrid of machinery and magic that obeys the design of the people who built it. Alva is not delusional. She knows the Omnitect is dangerous. She knows she is one wrong step away from unleashing something she cannot contain. She does it anyway.
The apex might answer the question that has defined her career: How did a civilization with this much genius collapse so completely?
The cost of her curiosity
Here is the uncomfortable truth. Alva puts the player in danger on purpose. She is aware that restoring the Temple revives constructs that should never breathe again. She watches blood engines wake from centuries of dormancy. She sees Vaal spirits resurface in the present.
And… she keeps going.
Because she believes knowledge is worth the danger. The future cannot be built on fear. That is her philosophy. The Vaal made catastrophic mistakes. If their technology can be understood instead of feared, Wraeclast might avoid repeating the same spiral.
Alva is a scholar who refuses to let history stay dead.
What she actually finds
Alva gets what she wants. The temple stands. The apex opens. The Omnitect awakens. The truth she finds isn’t a revelation, it’s a disappointment. The Vaal built a weapon that consumed their own people.
The Vaal were brilliant, but brilliance is not the same as wisdom. That is the lesson buried in Atzoatl’s stone.
And… that’s why her story matters. Alva did everything right. She chased the truth, rebuilt the temple, and pushed past the fear that silenced generations of scholars. The Vaal left her a warning.
Some knowledge explains the past. Some knowledge repeats it.
Alva spent her life hoping Atzoatl would show her which future she was fighting for. Instead, it reminded her that even the greatest civilizations fall when they trust their ambition more than their humanity.
