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In stories, it is said that the Court of Winter Revelry was the kindest of the winter courts. They represented the gentle parts of the season. The beauty of snow, the joy of winter games, the comradeship of sharing each other’s warmth in the coldest of times. It was said if you were to ever stumble into the domain of the winter courts, you had best pray that you find yourself in the presence of the Court of Winter Revelry, for with them you might make it out of their domain alive.
This was a reputation that the court had taken care to build for themselves. In truth, they were simply better at hiding their cruel nature than their more openly violent neighbouring courts. It was true that wayward mortals who fell into the clutches of the Court of Winter Revelry would be treated to lavish feasts, heavy drinking, and a stay in their warm halls as a reprieve from the cold for the night. But it was also true that once their guests had drifted off to sleep, the court would abandon them out in the freezing cold after having stripped them for all they were worth.
This part rarely featured in the tales though.
Most vicious of them all was the August Lord of Gentle Snows. He was a man that enjoyed any and all forms of pleasure, and did not care if he overindulged. Yet despite the image of the despicable charmer he presented, the man that lay beneath was someone capable of committing acts of terrible violence. This was a man who truly cared for no one.
The one person who it could be said that the August Lord truly respected was the Queen of Winter, supreme ruler of all the courts of the winter fey. She was the embodiment of all that winter was meant to be. Beautiful, enticing, needlessly cruel, eternally deadly.
He could not have found a more perfect woman to serve. He felt a deep love towards her. Not the sort of love felt by those that desired one another, or the love felt by family or by friends. Rather, it was the love that a truly loyal knight felt towards their queen.
On the subject of family, the August Lord had a very extensive one, both inside and out of the fey courts. Not that the August Lord held any particular empathy for them. Most of his fey relatives got a bit of passing acknowledgment at most, while his considerable number of offspring gained through dalliances with mortals barely had their existences noticed.
The most favour he would show his children is that occasionally, when one of them showed particular strength or cunning, he would invite them the join the ranks of his court.
Such was the case with the Darling Trickster who Unravels Enigmas.
What was notable about the Darling Trickster, is how she chose to respond to the August Lord’s invitation. Many of his children refused to associate themselves with him, but she made her refusal into a spectacle.
Why would she ever want to join a series of betrayals waiting to happen? When someone joined a group, they did it for companionship. And no one in the winter courts truly saw each other as companions.
And fitting for the man who ruled it, the August Lord seemed to be the epitome of that. He loved to forge connections with people, yet he seemed perpetually unable to care for a single one of them.
If he wasn’t such a cruel person, she could almost feel sad for him. But no, he was simply another villain. And not even an interesting one at that.
The August Lord had no retort that could match her. All he could do is leave.
So when he found out that the Darling Trickster had been frozen alive by his queen, he laughed. All her talking and witty retorts couldn’t save her when she was faced with true power. It’s a better fate than what she deserved, he thought, for being one who so frequently crossed the Queen of Winter.
A year later one of his sons died.
The name and story of this son is not necessary, save for the fact that his fey blood manifested in a more monstrous fashion than most. This led the people of his village to kill him out of a superstitious fear, and leave his corpse to rot out in the woods.
Augustian buried that son himself. He didn’t even understand why. He just knew that he had to do it.
The Trickster’s words about how he couldn’t care for anyone rested in his mind.
Over the years, a change would be noted in the August Lord’s behaviour.
When the rulers of the winter courts would gather to discuss what wicked plans to work on the world of mortals, one suggestion would be suggested from the Court of Winter Revelry again and again: mercy.
He would pass it off as a joke, of course. At most, it would be nothing more than a trick to make the winter courts seem more unpredictable.
But members of his court would note times when he would double back on hunts to make sure that those who were abandoned by the court in the cold would reach safety.
Rumours would spread about how the August Lord would take care to ensure that each of his progeny all lived peaceful lives. Most would not even learn of their heritage, much less how much their father had manipulated things to ensure their wellbeing. This lack of knowledge likely contributed to the peace in their lives.
In the centuries that followed, the image the August Lord of Gentle Snows would degrade, from the devious and violent trickster, to the mortal-loving fool who constantly got involved in reckless plans.
An Era reached its end. Due to events far outside the scope of this story, the deities declared that they would be sealing the Material Plane off from the other planes of existence. This announcement reached the various extraplanar entities first, to give them time to resolves their affairs before returning to their dimension of origin.
The Queen of Winter declared that she would not be returning to the Feywild, and would instead remain in the Material Plane after it was sealed away. Many of the members of her courts begged for her to reconsider, to please continue to lead them as the most brutal and violent fey court in the planescape, but she denied their requests and admonished them for this.
It is not the way of Winter to feel emotions like attachment.
The August Lord, too, chose to stay behind. His decision to abandon his court was not so heavily mourned.
Many even expected this. The man had stopped trying to actually rule his court decades ago. The once fierce and cunning warrior and deceiver was little more than a sham of the man, so it made sense that he would be joining the ranks of the many other outcast fey who either chose or were forced to remain behind.
But in truth, his lack of standing was not the reason he stayed. Or at least, not the main reason. During one of the last meetings of the winter courts, his queen made a remark that when the planes where sealed, the spell freezing the Darling Trickster, which was built upon a link the plane of ice, would also end. That was all the motivation to stay he needed.
He needed to see his daughter. He needed her to know what she had done to him.
He needed to tell her she was wrong.
He could care about people. He could help people with about people without some ulterior motive. He could do it again and again he would always screw up somehow, but damn it, he wasn’t just some pitiful villain. He cared!
He wanted to be mad at her. He wanted to scream and yell and curse her words for making him this way. He spent centuries trying to become a good person and it cost him everything.
He wanted to tell her that, and then he wanted to beg her to let him be a part of his life. To be his daughter. He didn’t have his court, he didn’t have any respect left, he lost every part of himself because he couldn’t be proud of what he was anymore all because of her. So could she still be his daughter, even if it was just for a little while?
He found his daughter on a beach, frozen to death.
She couldn’t have been dead all this time. It was well known that the Queen of Winter kept her prisoner eternally alive within her castle. Something in about the connection of the freezing spell being lost must have caused the magic to… malfunction somehow.
Either that, or his Queen had killed her.
Either way, he knew his queen was at fault. She was a master of magic, so even if she didn’t kill the Trickster herself, she would have known that spell would have malfunctioned and killed her. If she really wanted her free, she could have ended the spell herself.
She stayed behind in the sealed material plane just to watch her rival die. To see him suffer for it.
He told her that he was going to kill her.
He found her, hiding away in a cabin in the northernmost parts of the world, and he told her he would kill her.
She didn’t care. She never cared about any of it, did she.
What was all of his cruelty for? If it wasn’t for his own sake, if it wasn’t for his queen's sake, what was it all for? Had he just done it because it was easy? Was he too weak to ever consider being a good person without his own child verbally berating him, being frozen alive and then getting killed first?
After processing this brief mental crisis, Augustian came to the conclusion that he needed an actual plan. Killing a monarch of the fey was no simple task.
Her remaining allies would need to be eliminated. While most of the winter court had abandoned the material plane, a scarce few still wandered the land, including members of his own court. While most of them wouldn’t be a substantial threat, the Witch still had some monsters still loyal to her that could be a danger if she brought them to bear in a fight:
The Rimy Beast.
The Verglass Dragon.
The Somber Lord.
These three would need to be eliminated first, to ensure they did not interfere with the Witch’s death.
He would also need to find a way to separate her from her crown, her most powerful and often used artifact.She would still be a threat without it, but separating her from her crown could significantly reduce the challenge she posed.
He’d need contingencies. Lots and lots of contingencies. The more people who owed him favours, the better. What was left of his court wasn’t something that could be relied on, so he would have to start collecting favours from as many mortals as possible.
Conveniently, a war had broken out in the realm he found himself operating in, so there was no shortage of people who needed an archfey’s assistance.
He also needed someone to kill her for him. Even with the perfect scheme, she was his liege lady. Any move against her and she could just order him to stand down. Such was the power of a fey's liege. He would need a someone else to be his weapon that he could use to kill the Snow Witch.
He figured it would be a simple enough plan. Find someone down on their luck, gain their trust and train them up to be the perfect thief and assassin, and have them steal the crown and kill the Witch for him.
And he finds her. The unlucky girl is named Angelica. And she’s just desperate enough to need his help. Without his assistance, she’d probably get devoured by the criminal underworld like so many other people.
Then he gets attached. He gets to know her. Sees what she really is. A girl who wants to help her family.
(He could never care about his family that much)
He couldn’t have her abandon everything dear to her, so he abandons her instead. He hasn’t technically abandoned the plans. He still makes deals, forges contracts and builds up alliances for an inevitable showdown with the Witch that will supposedly happen. But this building doesn't lead towards anything
Then, one night everything changes. Augustian remembered there being a lot of stars in the sky that night.
A voice spoke out through the starry sky, promising that it would guide him too the way he would kill the Snow Witch.
Augustian wasn’t so foolish to not think that this could be a trap, but he was also desperate enough to risk it regardless.
He followed the voice into the woods.
As he exited the woods, he found himself in Iribosk, the village closest to the cabin where the Witch had hidden herself away (Augustian didn’t really pay attention to the fact this village was weeks away from the forest he had entered just hours ago)
The place had been entirely frozen over, and every single one of its inhabitants was dead. The witch had left her cabin.
One of the corpses drew Augustian’s eye. A dead boy. To most, it would seem as though he was no different from the rest. But his corpse was marked with two curses of the witch, so there was clearly something more to him. Furthermore, the boy’s soul, which had yet to fully pass on to the shadowfell, had potential in it as well. It possessed a great deal of innate magic, that if allowed to properly grow and mature, would make him into a very powerful sorcerer.
So he approached the boy’s spirit, and offered him a contract. He would get to live again, and in return, he would kill the Snow Witch for Augustian.
The boy took the deal, and Augustian got his weapon.
He was perfect. As it turned out, he was the reason the Witch had been released from the cabin, so if the witches curses weren’t enough to reduce him to barely a person, the trauma of dying and being responsible for the deaths of everyone he knew would.
He had enough strength to keep moving, but not enough move without his help. Enough feeling to still feel to feel hate, to want to hurt people. But lacking in the kindness that would cause him to get distracted, to second guess himself, to get attached to other people. And best of all, Augustian wouldn’t have to worry about getting attached to this one. He didn’t have a future he had to worry about stealing.
It did take a while to get the boy to function and take care of himself without being monitored constantly, but it helped to build up a fairly dependable mentor-mentee relationship. And once the boy was able to work on his own, he proved to be very good at operating independently, and Augustian was able to busy self with other tasks.
Making new deals, checking up on older ones, making sure to remind them that favours were still owed.
He wasn’t the only entity with plans in the same region, and he found himself involving himself with the other conspiracies at the heart of the kingdom. Not due to any interest over if they succeed or failed, just to make sure that they didn’t interfere with his own schemes.
Every once and a while he would check up on his (former) queen, living in her castle of ice once again. That was when he met the thing his (former) queen was living with.
The thing that almost looked like his daughter. But not quite. Anyone who actually knew the Darling Trickster would see that they were clearly different people. But the resemblance was enough to satisfy the Snow Witch’s delusions.
He didn’t like it, but chances are the thing would work as an effective way to lure the Witch out of her castle when the time came to finally slay her.
All of this additional planning lead Augustian to realize he wasn’t properly seeing to the boy’s development as a weapon. He was an excellent liar and cheat, able to almost perfectly pretend to be someone normal, but since leaving him to fend for himself, his combat abilities had fallen by the wayside.
Augustian needed to get him deadlier. Most notably, he needed a way to kickstart the boy’s sorcerous abilities again. He couldn’t have the boy relying on his warlock contracts by the time the final battle against the Witch arrived. The boy needed experience, power and allies. Luckily, the world graciously provided Augustian with a solution to his problem.
The war that had once ravaged the lands had long since passed, scars of that war it remained. One such scar was a high number of undead which roamed the land, to which the kingdom’s solution was a monster hunting organization that made use of criminals to exterminate said undead.
This was exactly the sort of assignment the boy needed. Working for this organization would put the boy through the dangerous situations necessary to mold him from a passable weapon to proper witch killer. The danger would likely also prompt his sorcery to reemerge, and the rank and file of the organization would be an excellent place to recruit allies for his quest.
The boy’s status as a killer lead Augustian to make another realization. For all the instruction he gave him, he never bothered to pass any lessons on stealth or subterfuge.
Someone still needed to steal the crown.
So, he tracked down Angelica, who was doing quite well for herself as thief. With Augustain’s connections, both she and the boy where forcibly conscripted into the monster hunting organization, conveniently placed on the same team.
It was fine, he told himself.
She wouldn’t have to fight the Snow Witch herself, just take her crown while his other pawn did the killing.
This was fine, he told himself. This was just the sort of horrible thing the August Lord of Gentle Snows did.
After that, things start happening very quickly.
Angelica dies on the first mission. It’s fine, he makes a contract with her to bring her back, and sets the conditions for to be released from service to be stealing the crown. This probably the best possible outcome, saves the boy the trouble of recruiting her to the cause himself.
She can still go back to her family when this is all over.
The boy finds out about the Darling Trickster. It’s fine, Augustian tells just says that she was his daughter, and lets the narrative of revenge write itself. No need to make his story more complicated that it needs to be. If the boy thinks his reasons for wanting revenge are as straightforward has his own, it keeps him focussed.
The boy wants to make a deal to save one of his other teammates, who’s been disappeared by the organization they work for. This isn’t fine.
He’s desperate. He’s willing to give up anything and everything for a chance to get her back. Augustian tries to reason with him to explain how this doesn’t help the plan to kill the Witch, getting involved with the schemes of other groups isn’t worth the risks, but the boy just. Won’t. Listen.
This can’t happen. If he can care about people like this, it makes him a person. And Augustian can care about people.
He can’t afford to care about his weapon like this.
He makes a rushed deal. He has other plans in the works right now, but he’ll get back at the boy for this. Remind him who’s in control.
He finds the girl the boy so desperately wants him to save. He tells her she can get rid of the incriminating memories that led her to be imprisoned, provided she swear an oath of loyalty to him. Augustian would honestly find it hilarious if she refused, meaning the boy couldn’t even blame him for it.
But she takes it, and he wipes her slate clean – entirely clean. Makes her into a new member of his court. A knight sworn to protect to the boy, to make sure he doesn’t try to lose any more of himself before the Witch is killed. He drops his knight off at her superior’s doorstep and explains everything, then heads north.
In the end, Augustian feels very satisfied with what he’s done. The boy’s new protector will make sure he doesn’t get himself hurt – or hurt himself. Spilling secrets to the church should prevent him from trying to make more enemies when he doesn’t need any. All of this to remind the boy of what his priorities really should be.
The thing that looks like his daughter was going to leave the Witch’s castle, to visit a villages local festival. This is the best time to capture it for the eventual “use it as bait” plan.
The boy and his team would also be attending the festival but that shouldn’t be a problem he would just have to be careful.
The plan goes perfectly.
Some other monster hunters get in the way, but the plan goes perfectly.
Angelica notices him while he’s working (why didn’t he think of another disguise?) but he promises to explain everything about why he was gone to her later, which buys him enough time to finish things, so the plan is going perfectly.
His contract with the boy breaks.
That shouldn’t be possible. One of their deals was the only thing keeping the boy alive, none of their contacts should have even been things that he could have broken. He should stop what he is doing. He should find out what happened.
But the plan is going perfectly.
More monster hunters try to stop him, but he beats them easily and they retreat.
The plan.
Is going.
Perfectly.
Augustian doesn’t think about how the boy isn’t connected to him anymore.
He doesn’t think about how he’s going to keep lying to Angelica when he meets her again.
He doesn’t think about all the people you’re using like pawns for some stupid grasp at revenge that isn’t going to work.
What is this all for, anyway?
The boy-Fleance, is in the woods with him.
He can see Augustian, despite the fact that he is currently invisible. That’s something he couldn't do before.
Fleance knows that he serves the Queen of Winter,
Fleance knows he never really cared about his daughter.
Fleance also suggests that Augustian never really wanted to kill the Witch. That this was all some game to him. That annoys Augustian. Of course he does. He wouldn’t do all this for the sake of some game. Killing the Witch is the one thing he has left that he’s certain he wants to do.
He tries to deflect Fleance’s questions with half-truths to try and figure out how exactly he knows this. Someone must be trying to use Fleance against him. To ruin all his plans. It must be the same person who somehow managed to free Fleance from his contracts with him. But who?
It was the Somber Lord, wasn’t it? No one else could be that obsessed with seeing Augustian fail to go through the effort to twist the weapons Augustian made against him.
But Augustian doesn’t have the time to fix this.
Fleance picked up a lot of new powers in the past few hours, and one of those involves trapping Augustian in a demiplane that makes him preform the moment of his greatest guilt like a play, inflicting pain and repeating the performance on again and again until he finds the lie at the centre of that guilt.
He sees himself train Angelica, on the day he decides to make her his weapon to kill the Witch.
He starts by denying his guilt, a before admitting to regretting using Angelica, using everyone in his schemes, but this isn't the true secret his heart hides, so the performance continues.
After 18 loops of despair, right before this demiplane of theatrical revenge can finish him off, he reaches the truth.
He never wanted to kill his queen. He still loved her. For the love that a knight has for his queen cannot be so easily broken. He wanted to believe that his daughter was right about her in the way she was right about him. Just she told him how selfish and wretched he was, she believed that the Queen of Winter could feel and could experience compassion just like everyone else. He wanted her to be right. He didn’t want his queen to be evil.
He thought that maybe, he could get her to say that she missed her. Maybe, if he took away all her power, her allies, and all the walls she had built up, he could finally get her to admit to the grief he hoped lived within her heart.
And then… they could just be sad together.
That was all he really wanted.
And with that realization, he was released from the demiplane.
Fleance hits Augustian with an eldritch blast. He briefly recalls a moment where the boy was shocked to learn that Augusitan didn’t actually know that cantrip, and that a patron did not necessarily have all of the abilities that his warlock had. Simpler times.
Hmm. Seems he got attached to his weapon in the end after all.
But he couldn’t talk things out with Fleance before, so he certainly couldn't now that he was on the brink of death. So he turns into wind and flies away.
If he had lived, he would have come up with a reason for why he needed to get away so quickly.
That he had to see his queen again, to repledge is loyalty to her anew in the hopes that he could still learns to make her feel like his daughter believed she could.
That he still promised that he was going to meet Angelica and would finally explain everything to her later that evening.
But those where thoughts too complicated for a man in a situation like his.
He just didn’t want to die.
But fast as he is, Fleance ended up being faster. A second eldritch blasts pierces him, and his form is reduced to nothing but snowflakes.
It would be nice to say that Augustian had one clear regret he held onto as he passed away. But the August Lord of Gentle Snows was a man too full of contradictions and inner conflict to ever have that simple of a feeling, even at the moment of his death.