Life energy and Souls // Reyna and Lucía

There is one scene in the REVELATION cinematic that rekindled my interest for life energy in the world of VALORANT, and that's the training montage. Sage enters room 5 of VALORANT HQ, grabs her gun and enters the training room, not before overriding the difficulty of the bots. All this time Omen is also in the room, calmly pruning a bonsai tree. While that whole montage is cool on its own, it is the small detail shown in the image below that really makes it one of the most meaningful scenes in the whole cinematic.

Clip of the scene

After destroying over a dozen bots, Sage is shot in the shoulder and knocked to the ground. She pulls herself up against the wall and uses her heal ability to restore the damage while still fighting off the bots. The focus then changes to Omen who turns around, alerted. And this alert poses a question: why does he do this?

Well, if you've read the title of this blog post you already know the answer. Life energy. You may also think that after all that intro fluff I would be talking about Sage and Omen, but you would be wrong! 

This is the first part in a series of essays talking about the agents (and maps?) that have a connection to life energy and souls, the first one being Reyna and her soul sucking powers, powers that bring with them a lot of questions I will hopefully address in future parts. Let's get to it!

Reyna, the empress

9 times. Throughout Reyna’s voicelines, she says “heart” 9 times. That is if we don’t count her ult lines. If we do, it's 12 times, the same as all the other agents combined. And from those other 12 voicelines, 5 are directed at Reyna. Suffice to say, Reyna’s heart is a central part of her as a character. And it’s not just her heart that is central, I pulled those voiceline statistics to show she is easily the agent whose voicelines have the most lore relevance if taken literally.

Reyna is generally known as sadistic and vicious when facing her enemies, whoever that may be. And while she enjoys taking the lives of her opponents, it’s not just a game. Spread throughout her voicelines is the abundant evidence that points towards Reyna physically needing to do so to survive:

• "Don't worry, your life won't go to waste."
• "All dead. And I'm still hungry."
•  "They're just batteries, and I need a recharge."
•  "That was a snack, I want a meal."
• "I will drain the life from our prey. That's all they're good for."
• "I have lied, beaten, killed to survive. I will kill again and again if it means one more day."
• "Somehow, the hunger always lingers."

While most of these lines display that sadistic personality, they also showcase that need to kill. If you go hungry for too long, you die. If you run out of battery, you die. But what is she looking for when she kills? What is it that she needs to survive? It’s souls. Surprisingly, she only mentions them one in her voicelines, “three souls”, when she gets a triple kill. That doesn’t mean it’s the only explicit mention of Reyna’s connection to souls, as the other agents make it clear:

• Brimstone: "Let's kill that Reyna, our team has got soul, I wanna keep it that way."

• Cypher: "Remember everyone, she can only suck our souls after we die. What a charming woman."

• KAY/O: "That Reyna won't touch a soul. I'll make sure of it."

• Omen: "Reyna, the souls you consume, do you hear their voices as I do?"

• Skye: "I'll keep my soul, thank you."

So Reyna needs souls to survive, that’s it right? Well, yeah, but survival is just the baseline. There are some voicelines that hint towards Reyna not always being at her full potential. When she consumes enough souls, she can enter her Empress form, and it’s when she wins a match in this form that she says the following:

• "This is who I was meant to be."

This could just be her rejoicing in the souls she has consumed, but let’s consider it’s not just that. Let’s put it in conjunction with two other voicelines:

• "These enemies have nothing special. Still human. Still mortal."

• "Oh. This poor place, it clings to life. A city after my own heart."

“Still mortal”. “Cling to life”. Both lines in reference to mortality, and in both of them Reyna denies her own. This is further emphasized by her name, Zyanya Mondragón. While the surname doesn’t bear much significance, Zyanya does. It has Zapotec origin, an indigenous civilization from the Mexico area, which according to multiple websites (although a more reliable source would be welcome) means “forever, always”, which given the previous context can be interpreted as living forever.

One additional line, said by Phoenix, also follows this line of thought, bringing attention to Reyna’s age, more specifically saying that Reyna looks younger than she may be:

• Phoenix: "Hey Reyna, how old are you? No shade, you look great! But like, sometimes you say the strangest things."

Name and lines come together to hint at a literal ultimate form which, given she consumes enough souls, allows her to be immortal (not invincible, as she is seen being forced avoid attacks in SHATTERED). And that’s the key part: if she can consume enough of them, which is a challenge considering she has to care for her sister alongside herself. The question now is how she absorbs and consumes those souls.

Remember I said her heart is a central part of her character? Let’s go back to the lines that show Reyna’s connection to souls. I purposefully left one out, a voiceline from Viper said on round start:

• Viper: "Fill your heart, Reyna. If you want results, I need those souls."

There’s two relevant elements: “fill your heart” and “I need those souls”. The second one is making reference to Reyna’s sister, which we will talk about in just a moment, so let’s focus on the first one, “fill your heart”.

Is Viper saying that’s where Reyna stores the souls? Her heart? Yes, but not her regular heart. Reyna is frequently depicted with a bright purple spot on her chest. Considering the color of the souls she consumes is very similar, it is a reasonable assumption that this is where the souls are stored.

A look at her tattoo drives this home. Running from the palm of her left hand, up her arm and according to multiple visuals, down to the center of her chest, this tattoo is a direct line for souls to be gathered and transported to this special heart. 

View the model on Kingdom Archives

And when I say transport, I mean literally. Both times we see Reyna consuming souls, that being in-game and in SHATTERED, she uses her left hand to absorb the soul, which causes the tattoo to progressively light up the same purplish color as the soul until it is all colored, at which point it returns to normal, signifying the soul has been absorbed or consumed, like electricity passing through a wire.

I'd like to point out that adding the tattoo on Reyna's left arm instead of her right is probably intentional, as humans most often have their heart slightly to the left on their chest, meaning that absorbing souls using her left hand is the fastest way for them to reach the heart.

Furthermore, it seems that the shape of the tattoo itself has a purpose. Let’s take a look at the hand and shoulder tattoos, to which I will refer to as nodes. A line comes off of the top part of the hand node, going all the way up her arm and into the shoulder node, which does does something similar, as another line comes off of it in the direction of the chest, where the glowing spot is, connecting them like, again, a wire, that directs where the souls should go. This begs the question, what does it mean for the nodes to be filled in? 

Right, so the souls are stored in some kind of heart. But what is that heart? Well, the key to this may lie in the Revenge for Life card, Reyna’s contract’s tier 9. In the wide version of Revenge for Life, a circular shape is covering the “Y” in Reyna’s name. A close look at this shape reveals that the centerpiece bears some resemblance to the tattoos in her hand and shoulder, the nodes.

View the card on Kingdom Archives

While this is a stretch, it’s possible that this circular shape is what causes the bright spot, the “heart”where Reyna stores the souls. There’s four pieces of evidence to support this. One of them is the curves coming into the “heart”, which are similar to those seen when she absorbs souls. This could be seen as the soul, or souls, entering the “heart”.

The second one, even less solid than the previous one, is the following Phoenix voiceline:

• Phoenix: "I'll crush her radiant heart."

It’s likely this voiceline is meant to show Phoenix hyping himself up to face a terrifying opponent such as Reyna, but it could also be seen as Phoenix referring to this separate, soul storing heart. Also, since it’s such a cool name, I’ll call the “heart” “Reyna’s radiant heart” from now on.

The third piece seems to be more intentional and it circles back on the idea of Reyna’s heart being a central part of her character. Just as the term centerpiece suggests, the circular figure is right at the center of Reyna’s name, drawing a parallel between the concept of the radiant heart and the figure.

The last one is the most intriguing. I’ve already talked about Reyna’s tattoo being some sort of wiring and the centerpiece being similar to the nodes, but this becomes relevant when noticing that it not only resembles the nodes but has a similar behavior. Looking closely, we can see that all “connections” coming off of and into it are only connected where there’s a pointy part, which is also the case for the nodes. Combined with the fact that the shoulder node has a wire headed to the glowing spot, the radiant heart, this could be a representation of its inner workings and the possibility that this is the final node, the place where the souls are stored.

Game texture of the tattoo, the red represents the connection
between the hand (left) and shoulder (right) nodes

As an extra point of interest, it is possible to see the glowing spot on Reyna’s chest pulsating during Agent Select, mimicking the beat of a heart. Considering these points, it could be that the shape seen in Revenge for a Life is some sort of container that causes the bright purple glow on Reyna’s chest. Is this the heart Viper is talking about? Can it physically be filled? Is this an insane stretch? Many questions, little to no answers.

Since I’ve said myself that this is a stretch, I should address any concerns regarding whether the centerpiece actually resembles Reyna’s abilities. On one hand there is the eye-looking orb from her Leer ability, which is not really similar given that there is only a vertical slit, nothing that resembles the “connections”.

 

On the other hand are the soul orbs, which feature an element similar to the curves surrounding the centerpiece. In my opinion, even this similarity isn’t close as the curves in the soul orbs all come out of and into itself, while the curves in the card each come from a different direction. If anything those curves are more representative of the beam formed between the souls orb and Reyna while it is being collected, furthering the motif of the centerpiece being the soul-storing radiant heart.