#faly

So! Faly and Vireon are two elven guys in my dnd world, a cleric prince and a wizard diplomat respectively. You might have seen Faly before—I’ve done a death tarot card of him and am currently doing a redraw of it since it’s nearly a year old now—but I haven’t yet drawn Vireon. Perhaps he’ll be next on my list.

Faly is, as I’ve mentioned, a cleric for the religious capital of my game world, and unfortunately partially possessed by an evil entity after he went through a LOT of fucked up shit when he was younger. Think being killed multiple times and resurrected over and over in hopes of the entity in question possessing him in full. Didn’t work out so good, but DID give him a direct connection to clerical magic, and made him quite the healer. Made him so good, in fact, that he’s shot up to be the next in line to the throne of his current home country, which… really, he’s not allowed to leave. He knows this, and has accepted it—plus, by the time that he meets Vireon, the world around this continent has completely gone to shit due to a lich reaching godhood, and… yeah. It’s a mess, I can go more into that another time.

Vireon is a diplomatic wizard who… really really REALLY sucks at interacting with other people. Very curt, very unpleasant, hard to get to know and even harder to be around. Desperately does NOT want to be in this country on diplomatic duties, really just wants to read the entirety of the countries massive library and solve the lich problem before it gets to his continent. Was put in this very unfitting role because, well… all the other wizards of his class kind of died. Exploded, actually, and somehow (grace of a god) he survived, and because he was literally the only guy left to do this, they sent him across the sea to try and get on this country’s good side (they do NOT like his home country). It goes… sort of okay.

Now Faly, who has never really met anyone who wasn’t instantly charmed by him or threw themselves at his feet (because, come on, he IS a prince, and he IS usually THEIR prince) is immediately interested in the strange foreign visitor. This is the first time he’s also met another person around his age, too—when they meet, Faly’s in his late 100s, and Vireon’s coming up on his first century. Faly immediately tries to engage with this strange new man and is so excited to maybe have a friend his own age.

It goes so fucking awful. So fucking awful. They end up hating each other for a while, Faly thinking Vireon an unpleasant, pompous ass, and Vireon thinking Faly an unhelpful and annoying obstacle to his mission of Fix The World. They remain like this for an entire year, until Vireon is shipped back off home to report to his superiors, who… are not super pleased by his behavior overseas. He’s supposed to be making them allies in this, godsdammit!!! Not questioning how their faith works with their magics!!!They tell him he has to start Playing Nice with the clerics, who… in all honesty, were Not Nice to Vireon either, or else he can’t go back. Being the wizard that he is, and having this trove of knowledge potentially taken away from him, he agrees. Begrudgingly.

When he goes back, he DOES try to play nice (he’s bad at it. So bad), but the damage is kind of done. The clerics don’t enjoy his presence, they don’t assist him very well when he asks, and the prince that was trying to befriend him snubs him at all chances, or just avoids him all together. Vireon has a very lonely few years stationed there, but it’s something he’s relatively used to.

Meanwhile, the world around them is still falling apart—refugees are coming in looking for sanctuary from the hells unleashed outside of the country, vampires are bombarding the lower borders at much higher volumes than they’d ever seen—Faly’s country is straining, and everyone is looking to him and his fellows to repair it—but they’re making absolutely no progress. They’re keeping the beasts out of the country, but they can’t make any advances into the territory overrun by the lich’s monsters, and they can’t find any way to stop him either. It wears heavily on Faly, and there’s many times that he breaks down over the near insurmountable task before him.

Vireon finds him during one of these breakdowns, and though he freezes at first at the sight of the sobbing, blubbering prince in an abandoned hallway Very Obviously trying to hide, he remembers that he’s supposed to make nice—and offers a small amount of comfort to the prince in the form of sitting next to him and listening to his struggles. It’s so much worse than Vireon had expected, and when he says as much Faly just nods in response. It’s so much worse than anyone thought—Faly had just revealed knowledge that only the crown was privy to, in hopes of keeping mass hysteria at bay.

After Vireon’s small show of kindness, though, Faly—who is unaccustomed to being treated kindly—latches onto Vireon a bit, and treats him kinder in turn, much to the shock of other members of the court. They actually do manage to become rather fast friends despite their hiccups, as they’re two desperately lonely souls trapped in terrible circumstances and find immense solace in one another’s company. Their friendship grows and deepens with each year that Vireon spends there, and they dance around their obvious desire for one another for CENTURIES before they actually end up sleeping together.

And when they do end up together, they are INSEPARABLE. They’re subtle about their relationship, cause so so SO many prying eyes, but they are madly in love with one another even though they won’t say the words. They’re soulmates, they’re one another’s first loves, they make the other feel like the world isn’t so terrible despite it being so terribly frightening. And of course, they have to go and ruin it.

Vireon gets a letter from home, claiming he may be called to duty. He has to return home at the end of the year, but doesn’t know how to break the news to Faly that it’s possibly an indefinite return. He thinks that getting drunk together will soften the blow, but really… it just makes them stupid. And forgetful. For the first time ever in their relationship, they sleep together with no protection (Vireon was ADAMANT about not wanting children, ever) and Faly (who is intersex!) falls pregnant with their daughter, Ria (short for Pyria). Just as Faly plans to tell Vireon about the pregnancy, Vireon announces that he has to return, and sooner than expected—the lich’s monsters have made their way to his homeland, and being one of the few wizards remaining, he’s been called to service.

Neither of them say it, but they both know that this is goodbye, perhaps forever. Faly, not wanting to cause conflict with Vireon—who does not handle conflict well at all—chooses not to tell him about their baby, and wishes him well on his return. Vireon leaves, leaving Faly a breakup letter that’s nearly 100 pages long which Faly can’t stomach to even look at, and a few years later Faly gets a tragic letter from Vireon’s homeland claiming he had died at sea in battle after his ship was sunk by a band of pirates. It shatters Faly even worse than the breakup did, though unbeknownst to him and his homeland Vireon had actually gone AWOL and joined the pirate crew that sunk his ship for… family reasons, to say the least.