Vespertine Hassan

Armor of Agathys plus Flames of Phelegethos plus Hellish Rebuke means come land a hit and regret it.

Fuck around and find out.

Vespertine's left arm is red, scaled and draconic, mutated by dragonblood experiments. He usually hides it under a mantle and a long glove that has his arcane focus on the back of the palm.

Otherwise he's usually wearing scale mail and is covered in knicks from rushing into the frontlines.

He has light blue skin (like cotton candy) and icy blue, nearly white hair. The stumps of his horns are nestled in his short messy, hair.

Faestival: Shrine of Extheves (Roulette)

Called upon by the Harper, Leosin, Vexpertine was informed that the Cult of Tiamat had constructed a great temple over the tomb of a long-dead dragon patriarch. Their aim was to resurrect the dragon sleeping beneath and learn an instrumental secret in returning the Dragon Queen to the mortal world.

Determined to not let the cult achieve its goals, Vespertine set out with the others Leosin had gathered. To avoid unnecessary battle, Ves proposed using his old soldier insignia of rank to blend into the temple as a cult aligned mercenary, sneak in, then stop the resurrection before it came to fruition.

That totally didn’t happen.

After getting past the front guard and picking iffy disguises, the group attracted the ire of the entire temple by cutting the guard down and unloading gunfire. Among the ruckus of fighting a cult mid-ritual and a badly thrown molotov cocktail, the dragon Extheves was revived anyways.

Extheves proceeded to burn down his own temple, forcing everyone to flee. The task was now to dispose of both the cult leader and the semi-revived dragon, so the squad fought a dragon and got beat to hell, but won before the Extheves could take off and lick his wounds. Loyal cultist carrying Extheves’ words were ended before they could escape, too.

Having brought down a dragon and searched the burned temple for survivors, the party rejoined with Leosin and went down the dragon burrow to collect scales at his request… only to be betrayed. Attempting to abandon the party for hearing Extheves’s words, the group climbed back up with sorcery and executed Leosin for his treachery. Ves would take his Harper amulet and look into his betrayal and change of character.

Vespertine also rounded up any remaining cultists and told them toknock it the fuck off, before inspiring/intimidating them to defect and live cleaner lives. He split up from Peren and Helssa amicably, to guide the ex-cultists to the non-occupied city of Veridyne.

Backstory

Vespertine was a former foot soldier for the Cult of Tiamat. He never paid mind to the goal of unsealing Tiamat, but Ves was motivated to protect his fellow soldiers and those seeking refuge in the cult-occupied city he guarded and grew up in. Vespertine had a sense of belonging at the cost of being indoctrinated by cultist doctrine. Even considering himself not very religious, Vespertine would chop off his horns to show some reverence to the dragons, believing that horns were only appropriate for those blessed by Tiamat.

Vespertine sought strength to protect others, more than anything. He volunteered to be in one of the first groups to undergo an experimental ritual: to become an artificial chromatic Dragonborn. This initial ritual proved to be a failure, with a high mortality rate and only a handful of surviving volunteers. Those who survived would possess an unnatural desire to cull other successful ‘dragonblood soldiers.’

Throughout the days after the ritual, Ves’s left arm would mutate and he would hear a deep voice in his head that pleaded for glory and conquest. As this was the voice of the power he sought, Vespertine accepted a bond with the dragon whose blood had been used in the experiment, and chose to wield a new draconic power.

However, Vespertine was changed in other ways by this experiment. He came to despise its death count and the deadly impulses it left him with, unable to look any of the other survivors in the eye. Ves began to see the real danger of giving the cult of Tiamat more power so he attempted to put an end to these rituals. ...This proved futile, as those behind the project drove him away and continued their research of mass producing dragonblood soldiers. Ves ran from the city he knew, and began looking for those who opposed the cult of Tiamat, to inform them of this project.

Vespertine now works as a wandering mercenary, trying his best to reclaim cities taken by the Cult of Tiamat. He tries to sway underling cultists to re-examine their lives and defect, while aiming to topple cult leaders.

Internally, Vespertine is slowly working with the spirit of the dragon that chose to reside in him, Red, dealing with the tormenting, heckling bastard and his tempting, destructive whispers only Ves can hear. All while continuously trying to do good.