Work Text:
Vannor remembered the sun.
Not the warm, honest kind that rose every morning over the dunes, but the other one. The one a man hurled from his hands like a judgment. A blazing sphere of divine fire that fell screaming from the sky and erased a young boy from the world.
He didn’t remember pain. Just light. Then silence.
When he woke again, he was aged. His body was bone, clean and pale, etched faintly with lingering magic like hairline cracks in porcelain. No breath filled his lungs. No heart beat in his chest. And yet... he stood. He walked. He thought.
The desert became his teacher.
The merchant hub where he’d been born, run entirely by tieflings, had decided he was wrong. Not horned. Not tailed. Not infernal enough. They sent him away with nothing but water skins and the echo of slammed gates, a rejection that etched a deep sense of otherness in his soul.
For years—years that didn’t quite count anymore—Vannor wandered as a skeleton child beneath endless skies. He didn’t need to eat. Didn’t need to drink. But he still felt hunger in the old, decrepit, phantom way. Loneliness clung harder than the sand ever did.
Then came the adventurers.
They found him with all but 2 wagons and a small staff he picked up along his travels. Where others might have screamed, these travelers laughed, waved, and asked his name like meeting a skeleton boy in the desert was merely unusual, not impossible.
They wanted to create a home without judging, without harm, a place to call home. Vannor helped them navigate the area. Together they built a merchant outpost—stone by stone— and when it was finished, Vannor wept like a little boy. Not of sadness, nor the loneliness he felt for so long
Vannor wept of joy and belonging But belonging is fragile.
One night, the desert bent. Moonlight twisted into colors that had no names. The air rang like laughter underwater. Vannor stepped forward, as the sand vanished beneath his feet.
He fell into the Feywild.
The place was too much. Trees with bark like stained glass. Rivers that whispered secrets. Time slipping sideways when he wasn’t looking. Vannor searched for an exit for what might have been weeks.... years... or maybe decades. Fey paths closed behind him. Gates laughed and turned into flowers.
Eventually, he stopped searching.
The Feywild didn’t fear him. Skeletons were merely interesting there.
Magic soaked into his bones, slow and patient. His body changed—not suddenly, but gently. Ligaments of moss formed from woven light. Muscle of vines followed, then skin akin to bark warm with borrowed life. When he finally saw his reflection again, Vannor saw a man not of bone, but one of the land that was now his home
That was when he met her.
She loved him not despite his death, but because of it. She loved him because he understood endings, and therefore cherished beginnings. Their home grew beneath glowing canopies, half- fey, half-something new.
Later still, they found a child.
A tiefling girl, frightened and alone, horns barely grown, eyes sharp with the same rejection Vannor knew too well. He didn’t hesitate. Blood had never mattered much to someone who no longer had any.
He became her father.
Vannor—once a skeleton boy killed by a false sun—became something rarer than any magic item or prophecy: a man who survived exile, death, and eternity, and still chose to build.
What he built wouldn't last too long though. Lost comes a natural part of life, even in such a strange place as the feywilds. Unbeknownst to Vannor, the daughter he welcomed home harbored a growing, twisted obsession
Murder.
At first, it was small. Animals went missing near the edges of their glade. Fey beasts found stiff beneath moonlit roots, throats marked by ritual cuts too careful to be wild. Vannor noticed. He always noticed. But the Feywild was a place of strange hungers, and his daughter was quiet, withdrawn, grieving in her own way.
She said nothing as the killings grew bolder.
Travelers spoke in whispers of a horned girl seen washing her hands in silver streams that ran red for only a moment before correcting themselves. Shrines cracked. Spirits refused to linger.
The Fey began to watch Vannor’s home with unease instead of wonder. When he confronted her, she cried.
She said the blood made the ache stop. That every death filled the hollow place where belonging should have been. That she dreamed of fire and gates and falling endlessly, and killing was the only thing that made her feel real.
Vannor held her. He told her she was loved. He believed it would be enough. It wasn’t.
The night his wife died, the forest screamed.
Vannor returned to find the canopy burned black with infernal sigils carved into living wood. His home—grown with care, love, and laughter—was soaked in stillness. His wife lay at the heart of it, expression peaceful, as though she’d chosen trust over fear in her final breath.
His daughter was kneeling beside her.
She looked up at him, eyes clear for the first time in years. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I understand now.”
She took her own life before he could reach her.
Hell claimed her soul the moment it left her body. The Feywild recoiled from the act, rejecting her passage as if ashamed. Vannor felt the bond between them snap. Not fade, not soften, but tear.
The forest grew silent.
Vannor buried his wife beneath a tree that glowed softly, even in mourning. He buried his daughter nowhere. There was nothing left to bury. And he did not rage. He did not curse the gods.
He mourned.
And then he began to work.
He traveled the Feywild with purpose, crossing courts that would not have him, kneeling before gods that barely remembered mortals. He delved into the mysteries of afterlives layered like skins of reality, explored hells bound by contracts older than stars, and discovered the intricate art of bargaining for, stealing, reforging, or breaking souls entirely.
He wrote everything down.
When he returned, he built a laboratory where his home once stood. Stone reinforced with living roots. Walls covered in chalk, blood-ink, and divine script. Theologies layered atop one another in frantic handwriting:
Asmodeus honors contracts.
Loki cheats and lies.
Slaanesh cares only for pain and pleasure Reggie Beans is a heartless bird
Souls are weight. Souls are fuel. Souls are doors.
He tested gently at first.
Transmutation circles meant to change soul-density. Crystals grown to hold echoes of the dead. Chimera experiments attempting to weave empty vessels capable of receiving what was lost.
None worked.
So he went further.
Soul traps. Rebinding rituals. The study of innocent essence; studying not for cruelty, but for purity, for power untainted by damnation. Each step tore at him. Each success felt like another betrayal of the man he once was.
But he never called himself mad. Madmen forget why they began. Vannor remembered.
Every chalk line was drawn with love. Every forbidden rite whispered with a father’s hope. He spoke to his daughter as he worked, telling her stories of the desert, of the outpost, of the kind folks that breathed life into him, and of the woman who loved them both.
“I’m coming,” he promised the empty air. “No matter where you are.”
Some say the Feywild avoids his laboratory now, a place of forbidden hope. Others claim devils watch it closely, wary of a man whose love defies the finality of hell, a man who will stop at nothing to bring his daughter home.
And if one day the planes tremble—if contracts burn, if hell opens not from below but from within—it will not be for power.
It will be because a father decided that no price was too high to bring his daughter home.