waitttt tell me about faedren’s fantasy surgery i don’t think i know about that
omg yeah cause it only happened a couple weeks ago! ummm so basically faedren was turning into a vampire right. got bitten by his friend who was essentially possessed by the power of a vampiric goddess and Fucking Died about it (didn't see heaven that time but he went to 0 hp) so! whoops! vampire time! which sucked and his body kept rejecting all of his own blood and eventually like. his guts. so the party had to get him what THEY thought would be essentially a blood transfusion to get him back to how he was before.
throughout all of this he's being terrible to his friends and especially the party member that got possessed and bit him. and it's because he's really shaken and having to confront his own mortality but truly he's been AWFUL to everyone. that party member says she loves him and he won't even really acknowledge it. bad time for this group.
anyway they had to make a choice between the creepy priestesses of that goddess or a rlly volatile wizard who wanted them to like. commit terrorism. faedren (religious freak who hates wizards) wanted the priestesses to do it but! none of the rest of the party trusted those guys (they were really creepy and their cathedral had a river of blood and stuff which was not too bad for faedren who was raised in a cult of murderous revenge but was really unsettling for everyone else) and eventually faedren agreed to let the wizard do it (not because he wanted to but his goddess sent an emissary to tell him that he had been practicing heresy and that he should stop being a dick to his friends and he was so upset about upsetting his goddess that he fully accepted that he was probably going to die and it was what he deserved 👍)
so they show up to the wizard after going on a little side quest for the materials that they need (some unmagical blood) and the wizard tells them that what they're going to do is Fully Kill Faedren And Bring Him Back. which is HORRIFYING but again he goes into this accepting it as punishment for being a bad follower of his goddess so he goes in there and lays down on the table and confesses his love to one of his party members fully thinking that he's not going to come back from this. (party member is a devil stuck in mortal form and he says "i love you" in infernal it's super emotionally meaningful actually.) they knock him out and then like. god. can't even remember all the things the dm said happened to his body. so many dice being rolled for all the wizards doing this operation... cracked him open and took out his heart and all his other organs, put his body in An Incinerator, reform it, reanimate it, it becomes a zombie for a second, they kill the zombie, and then bring his spirit back into his body—
and while his party is watching all of this go down, horrified, faedren appears in some kind of celestial meeting room, sees his goddess, sees his friends' gods, receives a sacred mission to go hunt down and slaughter the cult that raised him for their heresy against their goddess, and chooses to take the help of his friend's god and travel to the hells for like. plot reasons. can't entirely remember what's supposed to go down with that but! emotionally significant because what faedren chooses is an option that lets them go back to the place his party member considers to be home and an option that he thinks might let them like. settle down. incredibly meaningful gesture. and his friend's god tells him that when he comes back to life he'll be better than he was before but his blood will run like tar. and faedren goes "alright. cool. sounds good man" (<— awestruck from speaking with his goddess and run emotionally ragged)
so back on the mortal plane what happens is his party member (under the influence of like. theoretically his god) Sinks His Hand Into Faedren's Chest And His Nails Into Faedren's Heart and taints faedren's blood with his own blood. and THAT'S what brings faedren back. incredibly poetic moment where the party member who doomed him by poisoning his blood saves him by tainting it with her own. and faedren comes back and he's slightly more gorgeous than before and all his scars are gone but his blood runs black now 👍 and he's not going to get turned inside out by his own body transforming into a vampire 👍 hooray for modern medicine. he was absolutely correct to be horrified and it Did kill him but divine intervention came through for him in the end...
