Vythorn’s Return is the four-part story of The Arbiter, Vythorn the Endless Scholar, fighting his way home to The Void after his death. It is no Deathmatch. It is a long, strange look inside the man who has spent centuries pulling strings from the shadows: his buried childhood, his hunger for control, and the one thing he wants more than anything. Along the way he bargains with a true god, loses his Italian leather boots, and finally gets his revenge on The Shadow King. The arc ends Season 4 and then returns as a surprise after Season 5, turning everything the audience had just watched on its head.
Background
The Arbiter died at the hands of the Shadow King and his soul went to The Sands of Eternity. There he opened a portal that separated him from his companions, who were still hidden within the mirror, and secretly slipped away. It was a betrayal, but he still meant to keep one promise: to get back to the Void and to Elusia’s side.
Things were dire back home. The Shadow King, Agdrel, had been rebuilt and was back in power, and the Grandmaster was his captive in all but name. A choker sunk into her throat bound her, and she ran the Deathmatches for him from inside The Dread Fortress. Long before all this, Vythorn had kept a piece of the defeated Shadow King in a box rather than let his power go to waste. That decision would come back to haunt him.
The Story
Part 1: The In-Between
S4E14, Vythorn’s Return Part 1 (Vythorn alone in the in-between; the God of Fate) opened with Vythorn, played by Mudcat, falling through space and time in blue and green light. He felt no wind and no air at all. He landed in a lifeless swamp where nothing lived, not a fish or a gnat. There was a black river, and at the end of an old dock waited a little boat with one oar and a frosted lantern. Black slime clung to his fingers and would not come off. When he looked closer, faces and eyes swirled inside it.
Vythorn had never been much of a sailor, so he threw down the paddle and blasted the boat downriver with a gust of wind. At a three-way fork he chose the brightest, fastest path. The faster he went, the more black sludge splashed over his lantern, until it smothered nearly all the light. Then the sludge laughed at him. It ate his magic. His lightning simply failed to come, and the creature cooed, “Oh, they didn’t give you permission to do that, did they?” It swallowed his Italian leather boots whole and wrapped him like a python. Stabbing it did nothing, and neither did trying to blink away. In the end Vythorn let go. The slime became a warm blanket, the lantern’s light danced before him in a little infinity sign, and a voice told him, “It’s time. Wake up.”
He came up gasping in a lake and promptly failed to swim. After a lot of flailing he found the water was two feet deep. Barefoot and humiliated, he snapped his fingers to turn back time on his soaked clothes, which worked, though the boots stayed gone. He ignored a rock to the back of the head and climbed a great tree that grew up through the middle of a lone tower. At the top was an enchanting library full of tea-sipping strangers: aarakocra, halflings, a tortle, a white bear, a lizard with an eyeglass, a cat he was allergic to. Every book on every shelf was blank.
The crowd answered him one by one, laughed together like a choir, and seemed to know him. At the back sat a woman with chestnut hair and folded white wings. She offered him a drink, sweet with cinnamon, and pulled him into his own memories. In one, a young boy stood in the rain with his hands on fire while his family’s house burned behind him. In another, Vythorn stood over the dying Shadow King and chose not to finish him, because he couldn’t bear to let that power go to waste. The woman needled him past his titles. All of them, she pointed out, he had given himself. At last, under his breath, he admitted what he really wanted:
Vythorn: “I want to control fate.”
The whole room burst out laughing. Then every being in it melted into the winged woman, and the reveal landed: they were all one, the God of Fate, Fil. She offered him a bet. If he found the Testaments of Morir’s Cataclysm and kept his vision clear, he could hold the fates of everyone in the Void, and perhaps one day become one of them. “My vision has never been clearer,” he said, and took her hand. She blew on him and he blacked out.
Part 2: The Ruins of Giant’s Breath
In S4E15, Vythorn’s Return Part 2, Vythorn woke in Fil’s silent forest, a long walk from the Ruins of Giant’s Breath. Fil would not simply hand him the tome. Instead she raised two companions out of the dirt to be her eyes and ears. Both had failed her tests before. Ise, played by BDaveWalters, was a gaunt shapeshifter with a habit of lifting coin purses. Biff, played by doctorbees, was a small grung who was very proud of his glaive. Fil bribed Biff with candy, threatened Ise with going back to being dirt, and left them a two-hour hourglass whose sand fell the same way however you turned it.
On the road they found an abandoned carriage. Ise heard someone inside and quietly let Vythorn walk in unwarned. A frightened tabaxi boy named Kuro dropped onto his back and stabbed him in the neck. Kuro’s mother had gone to investigate a voice in the woods and never come back. Ise healed Vythorn’s wound by licking it with a cat’s tongue, which earned him a death threat. Biff stayed behind and barricaded Kuro in with books, backpacks and a dead tree. Vythorn decided that a would-be God of Fate ought to get some practice intervening.
The trail led to a cave full of gnoll families with the mother caged at the back. Ise took the exact form of the gnoll leader and killed the real one in a single blow. Then he announced to the stunned pack that they had been deceived by a shapeshifter. Vythorn crept in invisible and slowed the crowd. Biff charged with “the well-known battle cry of the grung,” spat poison in a gnoll’s eyes, and sent the pack into a panic: “It’s got a glaive!” Ise set off a fireball that also caught Vythorn (“You might say fate intervened”). Vythorn blew out the back of one gnoll’s head with chaos lightning. The survivors fled with their pups.
The rescue itself went badly. Vythorn froze the terrified mother in place, then nearly hit Kuro for clinging to his knee. Biff threw himself between them and carried the boy to his mother himself. In return she lit up a shortcut through the magic woods. Biff turned Vythorn toward it with the line that became the episode’s refrain: “You always have time.” In the tunnel beyond, Ise and Biff told how they had failed. Ise had shown an enemy mercy, and Biff had given his life so his friends could win. Along the way Biff learned that grungs have a cloaca and spent the walk staring at his own junk and screaming. Something clicked for Vythorn. He looked closer at the hourglass, saw it had been mended over and over with magic, and broke the spell. It shattered. “Well, at least the time is in my own hands now,” he said, hands full of sand.
The door to the ruins bore a giant’s carved open mouth and the words “I am thirsty.” Water vanished into it, and so Vythorn stabbed Ise and bled him into the bowl. When it wasn’t enough, Ise pushed the knife in further himself. Inside, a dusty old aarakocra with metal claws for hands introduced himself as Master Skreca, keeper of a museum of strange treasures. He had been the scribe of Morir, a humble man who loved even the endlessly warring giants. In frustration and rage over their bloodshed, Morir spoke words that split this place from the world and set “a million teeth of demons” on the giants’ flesh. Skreca had written those words down, and writing them had cost him his hands.
Then Ise shed his disguise to show his true changeling form. He asked the name of Vythorn’s foe, and when he heard “Agdrel,” he remembered. He took the faces of Vythorn’s father and mother and told him he had watched the Shadow King kill them with his own hands. Vythorn had spent his whole life believing his own runaway chaos had done it. “Son of a bitch!” he said. Fil stepped out from behind a pillar to pass judgment. Ise pledged himself to her service and was bound, against his will, into the shape of a little crow. Biff turned down both the candy and the offer and chose to return to the dirt: “I would rather die on my terms as a free grung than live as a pet in any capacity.” Vythorn made his vow, calling himself “a demon. Born of lies, shaped and molded by chaos,” and promising to pull the Shadow King’s strings “until he unravels into nothing.” Fil liked his ego enough to bet on him. “I should have turned you into a parrot,” she said, and sent him home with the tome.
Part 3: The Lord of Fate
S4E17 (Season Finale) - Vythorn’s Return Part 3 closed Season 4. Vythorn woke in the grass outside the old arena he had shared with Elusia. The Acolytes were cheering the end of another Deathmatch, and the Shadow King’s throne was descending from the sky. The Testaments of Morir’s Cataclysm opened before Vythorn, and their words burned themselves into his skin. Drawing the Void’s chaos storms down over the field, he screamed Agdrel’s name and blew the throne’s ornate structure apart.
Agdrel admitted everything, cheerfully. He had orphaned many chaos-gifted children so he could raise them and one day feast on the power they built up. Vythorn was special: “I was saving you for last. Like a dessert.” The duel that followed moved faster than the Acolytes could follow, shadow blades against lightning. When Vythorn was run through, he turned back time and learned his enemy’s every move. Then he remembered Morir’s words and tore open portals full of gnashing teeth. “What? What is this?” Agdrel cried. “This is your fate.” The maws ate the Shadow King’s body down to a yellow-eyed shadow, which Vythorn locked in a coffin of light.
Then Fil whispered, “Vythorn, what will you choose?” Vythorn wondered aloud whether his choices were even his own, and in that moment of doubt Agdrel’s soul slipped through his fingers and escaped into the storm. Elusia ran to him across the wreckage, begging him to break her choker. Instead he put a dagger to her throat, took control of the Goblins storming the field, and told her that her Void was weak. He pushed the knife in and began to cut her flesh, and for the first time, he saw fear in her eyes. Time froze. Fil asked who he would become, and Vythorn closed his eyes and answered: “I am the Lord of Fate. And this is my domain.”
Fil sealed the contract and warned him that “we will be watching.” Vythorn spared Elusia’s life but not her throne, and had her dragged from the arena in his own old chains. He spotted Doug hiding among the goblins in a goblin costume, wheezing on four legs, and sent him off in chains too. When the furious Acolytes rushed the field, he froze them all where they stood and told them: “You don’t have to love me. You don’t even have to like me, but you will all serve me.”
Part 4: The Longest Breath
The series had been billed as three parts. Then, after the Season of Fate ended, S5 Ep17 — Vythorn’s Return Part 4 arrived. It opened with Lord of Fate Vythorn, in newly made boots, walking down into the forgotten dungeons of the Dread Fortress. He was weary of rebellions, bickering subjects and the frustrations of his new assistant, Thea. He unlocked the one occupied cell. Elusia squinted up at him from her bed mat and books (“Agdrel? No, what am I saying? Vythorn”) and asked what could possibly bother the Lord of Fate.
He confessed he was lonely. Everyone around him was hollow, because he could never tell who was a real friend and who was under his influence. Elusia did not soften it. “Have you not become what Agdrel was to you?” she asked. She told him she had always known he would overthrow her “time and time again,” and had trusted him anyway, because people with their own will can shape you into something better than you would ever imagine alone. “It seems I’ve made a prison for us both,” Vythorn admitted. The bed in his chambers, he added, used to be hers.
Then he exhaled, and the truth came out. The entire Season of Fate had played out in a single breath. It was a vision of one possible future, glimpsed in the frozen moment when Fil asked who he would become, and only Vythorn ever lived it. Back in the storm, with Elusia still frozen in fear under his blade, he gave a different answer:
Vythorn: “I will be who I have always been. I am the arbiter of the Grandmaster. I am the other side of her coin. And together we will overcome fate.”
Fil reminded him that the book had been given and the Void laid out before him: “We will have to come to collect.” “We’ll be ready for you,” he said. Fil vanished with a Cheshire Cat smile. Vythorn shattered the choker around Elusia’s neck with chaos energy. She admitted she hadn’t known what he was going to do. “That makes two of us, I think,” he said. She hugged him, which the two of them almost never do. He warned her of threats beyond the Void that she didn’t yet know about, and they agreed to be ready to “fight fate itself.” Before the uncertain Acolytes, the Grandmaster spread her wings and declared a new era, one in which they would be “the masters of our own fate.”
Aftermath
The arc returned the Void to its old partnership, the Grandmaster and her Arbiter as two sides of one coin, now with both of them on the same side. Vythorn came home with the power of Morir’s Cataclysm. He also came home with a debt to a god far more powerful than either of them, and Fil had promised to come and collect. The Shadow King’s body was destroyed but his soul escaped, weakened, with the pieces of him scattered around the hells. The Deathmatches would go on, this time for a new and fresh reason.