the poorest thing in town

For organisation purposes (get it/?? ORGANisation. like. Organ. Organ hahahaha/)

#stick theory - my personal theories

#the up the down the in between - session notes/live reactions

as promised this is the long-awaited official theory on the Fey King. whereabouts, position, importance, the whole shlabang!!

we have been wrestling with this question for ages and ages. I've been theorising on the fey king since the second ever session, when i read a wiki page on Hilda fairies and learnt about the Fairy Entity who rules over them. i asked our wonderful dm if there was any adjacent creature in our campaign,and sure enough, she confirmed the existence of the fey king. We all naturally then assumed that the fey king would be in the feywild.

we were wrong. then we thought, hmmmm. If he's not in the feywild, he must be where all the lost fey souls are. The In Between!!!! again, woefully wrong, as confirmed by the lady of the Lake, who assured us that she would know if a being or object of such power and significance landed up in her domain.

next, we thought. Where else could he be. here started the Dark Days. where we had no dnd planned in the imminent future and were driving ourselves mad with the theory potential. it all seemed hopeless. but at last, in session 10, our dm shone a light into our frightened little bug hearts when orphan cast magic circle on the researcher fey, preventing her soul from leaving the domain and providing us with a very useful little nugget of information there.

now, with magic circle in 5e, you can elect to have the spell work in reverse so that one type of creature of your choice (fey) are unable to leave the space through nonmagical means. And if they want to use teleportation or interplanar travel to do so, they must first pass a charisma saving throw.

this means that the soul of the researcher (and i'm going to take a wild leap of imagination here and suggest that fey souls when stripped away don't possess the highest charisma stat) was unable to fully leave her body and travel to the in between.

as a result, it appeared to us as if she was fighting herself, not fully lost but definitely somewhere close to it.

and she seemed to be. Semi-conscious??

this immediately explains much of what we were missing when theorising about the fey king.

it's not that he wasn't infected, it's that his soul was unable to travel to the in between

now, magic circle as a spell only lasts for an hour, but there is a spell with an incredibly similar effect that lasts until dispelled..... hypothetically also letting it last for a thousand years. And this spell is Hallow. one of the effects that you can choose is extradimensional interference, where affected creatures can't move or travel via teleportation or interplanar means.

however, there are couple things about Hallow that may trip us up slightly. there are some extremely specific criteria that need to be met here.

First of all, hallow is exclusively a cleric spell, and it's 5th level, meaning that it would've taken a relatively high leveled cleric to cast this. Secondly, and arguably far more importantly, hallow takes 24 hours of concentration to cast.

this violently shatters any epic fantasies i was having about the fey king out in the wild with his trusted advisor and getting infected and the advisor pulling a doomed yaoi and sacrificing his last spell slot to save his king.

the 24 hours thing makes it so it cannot have been a reaction. So it wasn't that the fey king was infected and the spell was cast after. someone was actively trying to protect the fey king. it was a safeguard in the worst case scenario that the disease breaches the safety of wherever they hid him in order to keep his soul from being entirely lost.

this mysterious cleric obviously would have had to have been someone allied with the fey. A member of the court maybe?? the thing is, in casting this spell and preventing fey from leaving, they would have also been trapping themselves. because i don't think you can cast hallow from outside the grounds. so this Spellcaster isn't going to be conveniently wandering around for us to find. Also they are probably also infected because if the fey king is infected and they are with the fey king..... Yeah

However this sheds light on another problem. if the caster of a spell dies/gets trapped in purgatory, would it stop the spell???? from the wording of the spell i'm assuming not, because it says the duration is until dispelled, and dispelling suggests that's it's a very intentional action. If you die than that's still not..... Dispelling.

this also begs the question: where and when did the fey king go into hiding? And How did the Spellcaster know that choosing that specific effect of hallow would work??? Actually for the latter i think if the cleric was observant or had some warning or had seen anyone get infected firsthand, they would've been able to infer it, or at the very least have some gut feeling. but the first?

we know that the fey king was, at some point in time, active in his rule. because one of the fey at the institute in the fey city said that he hasn't been out for a while. which implies that he was out Once.

perhaps as the fey court caught wind of the great sage's betrayal and the release of the mushrooms at the sources of magic, they would've pushed for him to go into hiding

But how come no one remembers that?

Whenever we ask a fey what happened to the fey king, even flo, they all give the very same answer with the same peculiar wording. That he disappeared. you'd think that if he was merely sent to hide then at least someone would know

i don't think that his court sent him away to protect him at all.

if we backtrack a bit, you'll remember that we found the correspondence between the great sage and the fey king about the great separation. They were planning this in secret, for mutual benefit. So what if the fey court didn't know anything about it at all until after it had already happened? The barriers created and the mushrooms planted and only the fey king to answer for it

he would know, after learning about the mushrooms, that the great sage would go after him. he is after all a symbol of power. And what better way to crush the fey entirely than to eliminate the one at the very top??

so the fey king ran away himself, because he's a coward. Or because he wanted to try and fix things himself

Maybe he believed that the great sage could be reasoned with??

either way, i believe that with such power, he would've been able to break through the barriers, assuming that they weren't fully formed yet. Because those can't have sprung up overnight. it's a massive undertaking. (Ppssst more on that another day? The Barriers I mean)

so he went to pay a little visit to the great sage. And was greeted with some mushroom soup.

No I'm joking

he would've maybe tried to arrange a meeting on neutral ground?? knowing that the great sage would try to trick him he cast a spell to protect himself, where even if something terrible happened to him he would remain in place (and maybe he left a message that could be deciphered?? But ultimately no one found)

also, the fey king definitely knew about the in between, unlike the great sage. Because he had sent a guardian there

The fey king being a cleric isn't such a crazy thought

so they met and the great sage threw mushroom spores in his face but the fey king wouldn't have gone without a fight and the place came crashing down around them? Where they remained buried for millennia with his soul trapped in purgatory

While the great sage perhaps tried to teleport away or some equal trickery. But was unsuccessful and remained trapped a small ways away

until a mining expedition at a desolate location funded by a dwarven family uncovered and resurrected him (yes I know that the spell Resurrection only works if the target has been dead for less than a century but Fuck Off)

and the fey king's hallow spell protected him from discovery (for now?)

now one supporting piece of evidence for this theory is that it explains why the great sage didn't take anything from his apartment when he left.

to elaborate on the previous post's tags the added part i like in the broadway recording is the. Bridge I think it's called???? is this a trap that's being laid for me is this a trick that's being played on me. i used to see the way the world could be but now the way it is is all i see