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bestofallcw body horror and suicide
Festival grew up in a city-state called Boywold, the son of itinerant performers who had fled from unrest in the more rural south. Their family, along with other refugees, were taken in by the local Caydenite community, and Festival grew up in a human-dominated society somewhat divorced from his amurrun heritage. As a young man, he was recruited to the ranks of the palace guards and trained to use his innate magical talents as a bard to become a covert royal bodyguard. After several years of training he became the king's court jester, which provided an excuse for Festival's presence at court functions as well as an opportunity for his inner attention hog to shine.
Years passed, and the roving warbands that terrorized the disunited south became a growing threat to the surrounding regions. A warlord known as Spineripper the Merciless had succeeded in uniting the tribes of the Bate Wastes, after which he turned his attention to the "civilized" countries of the surrounding area. With Spineripper's horde approaching Boywold, Festival did something very brave and very foolish: he abandoned his post, infiltrated Spineripper's camp, and assassinated the warlord and attempted to usurp his place. He successfully impersonated Spineripper long enough to convince the horde to return south and to implement some changes to make life more equitable for its members. However, he had severely underestimated the social and political complexities of tribal culture and was discovered by one of Spineripper's lieutenants, who summarily executed Festival in secret lest the truth about their leader's ignominious death become known.
That should have been the end of Festival's story. As a good and faithful worshiper of Cayden Cailean, the god of ale and freedom, Festival was granted entrance into one of the heavens...only to be ripped from it a few hundred years later when a desperate mage exhumed Festival's body from Spineripper's supposed grave and forced a resurrection upon him. Festival was informed that after two previous attempts by great heroes had failed, he and seven of history's greatest monsters had been brought back to life to deal with a world-ending threat in the form of a mysterious expanding red dome that had absorbed great swathes of the countryside along with several cities not far from Boywold. It quickly became clear that the mage believed Festival to be Spineripper. Wanting to help and suspecting that he might be rapidly returned to the afterlife if the mage learned of his mistake, Festival refrained from correcting him. He also rather suspected that the mass murderers he was sent to work with might return him to the afterlife themselves if they saw him as an outsider or perceived weakness in him, so he took up the guise of Spineripper among them, aggressively playing up the persona of the warlord.
Through a series of investigations, the group discovered that the red dome was actually an enormous prismatic sphere (a magical shield made up of seven layers, each with its own dangerous magical effect). It had been created by a master artificer known as the Lord of Icy Mists, a silver dragon who had been inflicted with a mind control device powered by an abyssal parasite. Further investigations in the Lord of Icy Mist's library revealed that he had been enslaved by Avanostrix, the angel whose duty it was to guard the material plane against the creatures of the hells and abyss. The dragon had fought the mind control and succeeded in leaving behind the tools and information to build a failsafe device to counteract the prismatic sphere before he had died. In order to counteract the prismatic magic and safely enter into the sphere to face whatever was inside, the group would need to combine the essences of seven rare artifacts into one magical object.
The first item was a gem they found embedded within the dead dragon's brain, where he had grown it bit by bit with his own magical powers, slowly killing himself in the process. The next was the Poison to Kill the World, a bioweapon created by a black dragon who had long terrorized a human settlement defended by a human oracle called Blind Agnes. The group was split on how to handle the issue, particularly after the dragon in question offered to trade them a sample of the poison in exchange for killing the oracle. Festival, who was entirely opposed to this plan, managed to nudge certain suggestions to the forefront and stir the pot long enough to cause Ailish, the group's necromancer, to become frustrated and take matters into her own hands, negotiating a deal with Blind Agnes by which the group would instead ambush the dragon with the oracle at their side. Festival's private self congratulations were cut short when several members of the group turned on Blind Agnes during the fight. They ultimately slew the dragon, but Blind Agnes suffered an agonizing death Festival was unable to prevent. Horrified by what he had witnessed, he had a breakdown in the wake of the fight, showing the first major cracks in his Spineripper facade.
With their life forces tied to the mage's magic, all of the motley resurrectees had a choice: they could do his bidding and save the world, or they could be returned to the dead. Fearing a return to the various hells from which they had been restored, the others quickly began plotting ways to ensure their own continued survival independent of the magic sustaining them, to Festival's secret distress. Their next effort was to collect a Soul Beyond Redemption, for which they traveled into an undead city and fought a cruel ghost king to imprison him within the gem. They managed also to capture an air djinn who had been prisoner of the ghost king and who would have fulfilled the qualifications for the fourth item, the Essence of the Storm, but agreed to release him and seek out his ne'er do well cousin instead in exchange for a set of wishes from his brother.
Unable to prevent the others from wishing for their own immortality and at his wit's end trying to keep up a ruse that was no longer working, Festival came clean in the most dramatic way possible: he stole a magical-mechanical heart another member of the group intended to use to gain a new lease on life and used the device to cut out and replace his own beating heart, hoping to fulfill the next requirement: a Pure Heart. His leap of faith proved founded and the gem accepted the essence of his heart. With his secret out Festival half expected to be killed on the spot, but his hope was that his sacrifice would render it unnecessary for the others to attack anyone else they deemed to be of pure heart in order to power the gem. They ultimately chose not to kill him, though he found himself ostracized and bullied from that point onward, his words no longer carrying the same weight as those of the others. Fortunately, by this point they all agreed that the world would not be worth living in if they did not put an end to the threat they had been resurrected to counteract.
Chasing down the other djinn for the Essence of the Storm and obtaining the Shoes of the Traveler from a magic college proved somewhat less harrowing, though the group picked up a hanger-on by the name of Danariel, a young paladin. Danariel, an honorable young man of good intentions, chose to take up the quest with them despite receiving a vision of his own death--a vision Festival would later see for himself when the group retrieved the final artifact, the Eye of the Blind Prophet. Angry after learning that the Eye's guardian had manipulated events to create the rise of two of history's greatest monsters to ensure a prophecy would come true, causing untold suffering, Festival swore to himself that he would not allow Danariel to die as he had foreseen. If fate needed mortal hands to come about, he reasoned, fate was clearly just a bunch of bullshit.
With the gem fully powered, the group made their way to the ever-expanding prismatic sphere and used the gem to pass safely through its shell. Inside, they found an eerie, unnatural world of law and peace, where every single animal, plant, and person absorbed into the sphere had been remade into perfect, idealized duplicates. There was only one species of each kind of plant or animal, no predators, and all the people were humans exactly alike to each other, all of them mind-controlled into perfect obedience to the law by the same type of device that had been used on the Lord of Icy Mists. Here, too, they met the heroes of the realm and the great heroes of history who had gone before them to attempt to undo this threat only to also be captured and put under the control of Avanostrix, who was in turn working for the goddess Vildeus and believed himself to be saving the world by ridding it of war, strife, and free will in general. An epic battle ensued in which Danariel was killed exactly as the vision had foretold, only to be resurrected moments later by one of the party members who had turned from his evil ways. Even though Festival ultimately had nothing to do with it, he felt vindicated that they had cheated fate in this manner.
Just as they felled the mind-controlled heroes, Avanostrix sacrificed himself to summon Vildeus herself. Festival pleaded with the goddess to understand that what she was doing was evil, but was unable to win her over with creatures of true evil at his side and still attacking her. It was only when another party member went through Avanostrix's bag and found the orb that he had used to conjure the demiplane on which they currently stood that the fight was brought to an end. Making a snap decision, Pestilynz threw the orb to the ground, breaking it; the sky followed suit by cracking open above them. Festival would have been content to die in that moment based on what he'd been through and the promise of heaven awaiting him. He was, however, rescued by Kadian, the party member who had resurrected Danariel. The entire party was able to teleport away and survived, with the exception of the Bog Lady's dinosaur companion, and they quickly went their separate ways.
Festival returned to Boywold; though all the people he had known in his life prior to resurrection were long gone, he wished to help the influx of refugees from the lands ravaged by the sphere, scout out and train the next generation of heroes, and ingratiate himself with the court in order to keep an ear out for news from throughout the lands in case any of his former traveling companions made trouble. With many of them now reformed (or at least having fulfilled or lost their various needs for vengeance), Festival hoped to have peace, knowing that if he were to hunt any one of them down he would risk the others coming after him together.
