#but the Valafar arc is almost over! We just gotta commit double regicide and get Prince Iari on the throne!!!

[princelucivaryaslana]

I’ve screeched a couple of times about my tielfing druid on here because i was experiencing 24/7 constant anxiety and Rejection Sensitivity Dysphoria symptoms because of his nonsense, but this past session I learned that uh

He’s not responsible for any of the shit he’s responsible for.  (Under a cut ‘cause i know myself, you’re welcome)

I thought Mercy was born Prince Valafar Nemonis, crown prince of his country, top assassin (Mastermind rogue actually but y’know) in his king father’s criminal organization dedicated to...acquisitions...involving specific magical items made from the shattered remains of the planar shard gems from our last campaign. I thought his father was King Barnabas “War” Nemonis, descendant of The Red Devil, a man who destroyed a centuries-long socialistic peace in the name of family and country. I thought his mother was Queen Lilith Nemonis, fallen aasimar paladin of a war god, a mother who rejected him the moment his little brother was born. I thought his brother was Prince Iari Nemonis, who was purple like his grandfather and had his grandfather’s horns instead of being pink w/ rams horns like he should have been (Barnabas is red, our entire group headcanons fallen aasimar as being Yasha pale, color theory, y’know) and was vilified and beaten mercilessly by their father because of it as “training.” I thought he was in love with an aasimar druid girl named Tiana Thorrinson, who had been taken from her family as collateral of war when she was a small child and was assigned to Prince Valafar to keep an eye on when she turned 15 in case she should make any designs against the country. 

And I thought that Mercy had run away in panic and confusion after being struck by a sword he’d been assigned to take, a sword bearing a piece of the Faewild shard that had reacted violently with the strong magic in his blood and caused an explosion of green light that resulted in his target’s death, brain damage and magical rewiring in his head, and the bleaching green of his once solid black eyes. I thought he’d spent the year between The Incident and the beginning of the campaign proper re-evaluating his life and realizing that he’d been a monster whilst learning how to use the druid magic the shard had given him. I thought he took on the name Mercy as a reminder of the kindness he wished to exemplify from then on.

Turns out I’m a big ol’ fuckin dumbass idiot 

Most of that stuff is true, all of it except the part about Queen Lilith, Prince Valafar’s mother, being an aasimar. She’s actually a pale orangey-red tiefling (Prince Valafar’s paternal grandmother was a darkish pink tiefling, that’s why he’s bubblegum pink).

Mercy’s mother, however, WAS a fallen aasimar paladin of a god of war (who had ascended from an angel of conquest), fallen specifically because she rejected her god’s call for conquest in exchange for a life defending the weak.

Let’s start from a little while before that. When he was 18, Prince Valafar was given his first proper assignment, an acquisitions job instead of just a simple assassination. He was sent to the Faewild to take a glaive set with a piece of the Material Plane shard called Chastieföl (yes, I know, hush) that belonged to a family living in a human settlement. The family it belonged to happened to consist of a human man, his fallen aasimar wife, and their protector aasimar son named Enlevan (turns out, when a god of war rejects you for choosing peace, other celestials look upon you favorably). After destroying the settlement, the prince found that the glaive and the family were gone. A few months later, he found where they’d gone, and he destroyed swaths of forest in his wrath. This time, Enlevan confronted him (he’d taken an oath of vengeance against Prince Valafar), and after a long and arduous fight, the prince won and killed Enlevan, taking the glaive and mounting it above the doorway of his family’s throne room.

Five years later, Prince Valafar was sent to clean up after that botched sword mission, and when the nobleman’s son distracted him and he was struck with the sword, the explosion that killed the nobleman killed him, too. Now, shit has gotten real complicated in lore, and apparently there’s a little section of the Faewild (I imagine it’s maintained by Circle of Dreams archdruids) where souls who still have purposes to fulfill go to exist in their purest form (aka children). Turns out, Enlevan’s soul had gone there when the prince had killed him, and because of some noodley shit dealing with that and Enlevan being a Circle of Courts druid and him having lived in the Faewild and the gem in the sword being a piece of the Faewild shard and his family’s glaive having been made and gifted by Eladrin, etc. etc., instead of having to wait thousands of years to be reborn, Enlevan ended up being suddenly and violently shoved into Prince Valafar’s now vacant body.

This WHOLE TIME, Mercy (and I) has been coasting on the assumption that he was Prince Valafar Nemonis, that he abandoned the few people he cared about, that he was responsible for hundreds of deaths and lives, and that the only way to rectify all of this was to pick apart King Barnabas’s resources until Mercy and his friends could destroy King Barnabas once and for all and get either Mercy himself or his brother Iari on the throne. But nope! None of the shit that’s gone wrong with the Nemonis family or all those people or the little noble boy or ANY of the rest of it is my fault! And it’s not my problem! I could just abandon all of this shit since it’s not my responsibility! I’ve never experienced this sort of relief before in my LIFE!!!

Still gonna clean up Prince Valafar’s shit tho, and my party’s problems are my problems, too, but like BRO it’s so nice to clean up after other people instead of after myself and I might actually be able to fuckin play my character in a helpful way now instead of sucking at my gotdam job, especially after I take a few fighter levels (seriously, look at this shit, the only one that sucks is Circle of the Keeper).

I’m so fuckin giddy this is gonna be awesome and I’m gonna personally kill the queen if I have to die for a third time (fourth time, if you count Prince Valafar’s death) to fuckin do it