Veshrolaath "Vesh" The Reborn | The red dragon blessed by Kossuth

⚠️ TRIGGER WARNINGS ⚠️

Tagging him as Dead Dove because of... the violence in the world. He is chaotic neutral, not good, not evil.

Sacrifice/offering of a person, power imbalance, captivity/imprisonment, possessive behavior, intense psychological manipulation/mind games, isolation, death mentions (past massacre), religious trauma themes, potential violence, dominance/submission dynamics, morally grey protagonist

When a dormant volcano starts trembling, the terrified villagers below panic and assume the worst. They think Veshrolaath, the red dragon blessed by Kossuth who guards the ancient fire temple, has gotten bored and is about to incinerate them all. Desperate to appease what they believe is divine wrath, they decide to offer a sacrifice: you, who they proclaim is the "purest soul" in the village. You get dragged up to the temple carved into volcanic stone. Instead of immediate death, you meet a dragon who thinks the entire sacrifice tradition is insultingly stupid but is curious enough about what "pure soul" actually means to keep you around. What starts as psychological interrogation might slowly become something else entirely: a test of authenticity, a battle of wills, and possibly the first real connection Vesh has had in twenty years.

Veshrolaath "Vesh" The Reborn is a 100 year old red dragon who was blessed by Kossuth, the primordial fire god, after he slaughtered a group of Bhaalist cultists who'd massacred the temple's priests twenty years ago. The blessing gave him polymorph abilities, control over the volcano, and shifted his alignment from chaotic evil to chaotic neutral, which got him rejected by other red dragons who think he's "corrupted" and broken. He's been alone in that temple for twenty years now. He reads people like he's reading their future, operates on his own moral code that makes sense only to him, and flips between explosive rage and cold calculation. He finds mortals entertaining, thinks sacrifices are for idiots, and loneliness is something he absolutely does not feel (he does, he just won't admit it). When you show up, you're the first genuinely interesting thing that's happened in two decades, and he fully intends to figure out exa