Summary: Simeon Tor's family is renowned, and feared, for their reckless quest to discover the secrets of fire. No sooner than he graduated from a prestigious school of wizardry, did his country call him back to fight in a hundred year war against an orcish horde. Such is the fate of all from his homeland and his father, and his fathers before him never shied from a battle. Happenstance calls him and his new friends back to the academy. Greatly changed by the war, he struggles to relate to his old friends living peaceful lives due to their sacrifices. But, when he discovers a clue from his uncle regarding his family's greatest desire, the "eternal flame"; he and his companions must travel deep into the underworld facing horrors beyond anything they've ever seen before, and discover the origins of a war seemingly without end.
Chapter 1
Simeon slammed his back against the barricade which towered over him. He wasn’t sure if he soiled himself or if the cold ooze of the mud embraced him. He put down his hand to lean to the edge of the barricade, definitely was the mud this time, he thought.
Arrows, he recalled the commander's yell. Simeon could see his commander a mage hand away, pinned to the ground by one of the shafts.
“Must have let loose early,” Taryn said as she knocked the barricade a good inch with her shoulder. A few more of these arrows began to fall like the first drops of rain in his family’s garden. Simeon put the thought of home out of his mind.
“Where’s Gyr?” Simeon asked as he pressed his back against the barricade and tucked his knees into his chest. The wooden wall shuddered as an arrow with a head the size of a sword point slammed through the planks showering them with splinters.
“Best to sit an inch or two away,” she slapped his shoulder and they both slid through the mud and put some distance between the planks and their backs. Taryn raised her left arm and concentrated on Gyr. There was a cry through the blue dawn skies, which were beginning to overcast with black smoke. A flurry of light then whitewashed the morning and threw stark shadows everywhere Simeon looked.
“They have a warlock?” A ruddy faced man yelled rhetorically over to them from the barricade across the way. Gyr’s crumpled, little body fell into the mud. Just another of the many thuds that started to pound the muddy ground, sounding like a butter churn as the arrows began to come down in full.
Taryn’s eyes grew wide at the sight of Gyr lying in the mud like some worthless bird. She buried her face into her knees and listened to the hellish rain. Simeon watched as javelin sized arrows began to fill the ground around them like his sister's pin cushion. If one hit where another was already in the ground, it splintered the shaft, spraying Simeon’s face with bits of wood. He tucked his face against his knees and just wished he knew one of the gods those clerics always seem to pray to.
The sound of falling arrows began to quiet. Simeon could feel the hairs on his forearm get hot and he glanced down range over them. The arrows began to catch fire, like a sapling covered in pitch, and gave off the heat of several torches.
He tapped Taryn’s shoulder, “They plan to cook us.” He saw a glint of metal in the corner of his eye and looked to see a plate armored foot soldier, that had dropped his sword and shield, was making a mad dash for the trenches further down field. Like a rag doll hit by a stick, the shining armor was slammed into the mud and stuck there face down. Looking back over to her, he saw the ruddy faced man and another robed figure behind him, running from the nearby barricade to theirs.
His ruddy face never took eyes off them and in his hand he tightly gripped a worn staff held close and parallel to the ground. The top was a solid root ball polished by years of burnishing. The two of them hunched lower than the shafts of the arrows, ducking and weaving between the forest of improvised torches.
“Fark it’s hot, we can’t stay here,” the man said to Simeon and Taryn.
“Gyr?” She looked-up at him sobbing. The other man began to kick some of the flaming arrows over, stomping them flat into the mud. Simeon threw up his hood; the heat on his face became unbearable.
The man stood upright, almost as tall as his staff, and looked out to the owl, “He’s gone." Holding out his leather wrapped arm. “Jaric." Taryn grabbed his arm and he pulled her up out of the mud. Simeon got to his own feet and noticed that somehow their section seemed to be the only one not fallen into chaos. To either side of them massive green monsters were colliding with shielded men bracing each other. In some sections the two or three men were not enough to hold back the monster’s charge. Once the men were prone in the mud the creature’s great axe crushed, more than cut, into their helmets. In other sections the braced men took the hit and, regaining their stance, began to jab at the beasts with spears or swords.
“Jaric, Firewall,” the other man shouted. He waved his hands holding a small focus in one. Simeon could see his lips muttering something but couldn’t quite make out the words. His fingers flickered like flames and the palm of his hand pressed outward before he flattened it to face the ground. Sweeping his arm before him, Simeon felt the intense heat from the sides of the barricade.
Jaric began a similar evocation and Simeon could see a wall of fire rise up to his left, adding heat to the already unbearable forest of flames from the many arrows still standing around them. Jaric hit him square in the chest with his staff. He had seen the spell before and knew it, but he had never performed it other than to practice, certainly not under these conditions. He faced the remaining open side and could see a muscular green arm swing down a great axe that split a nearby caster in half.
It turned its ugly tusked face toward him and began to dash over. He wasn’t sure if his hand was moving correctly or if his words were well spoken. He took a piece of phosphorus in his hand, and before the orc could get to the line he envisioned before him, the fiery wall towered above them, anchoring the far ends of the other two into a triangle of fire.
Simeon looked down at his hands and noticed he was still holding on to the phosphorus for the spell. He looked over at Taryn who, looking like a chaotic mixture of tired and enraged, was shaking off the smoldering effects of her spell from her hands.
The orc burst through the flames, his hulking mass of flesh, now a smoldering mound, erupting into a blaze. “Move,” Jaric shouted. Simeon ducked just as a great axe smashed through the barricade getting stuck three-quarters of the length of the blade. In the moment of confusion on the orc’s face, Simeon rushed over to the group which now stood in the center of the flames.
Pulling on the haft, the orc followed Simeon with its gaping maw, spittle flying in his face, he knew this spell well. Shadows of orcs were visible on either sides of the fire that surrounded them; Jaric’s friend was kicking over what remained of the flaming arrows.
“It’s not just for smoking,” Simeon said to Taryn as she looked at him lighting up his churchwarden pipe. The bowl of pipe leaf burned with an aromatic that reminded her of her mother’s kitchen. He took a long draw on his focus and burned the leaf, concentrating just behind the barricade pointing two fingers with his freehand. An orb of fire no larger than a human skull formed alongside his palm. The orc screamed, its flesh melting from its burning bones. It pulled free the great axe and raised it high before taking a step toward them. The orb landed close behind the green beast and expanded brightly, as if Simeon had captured a burning sun and brought it to the earth. The orc vanished into shadows, eclipsed by the light. When the light dimmed and the roar quieted, the charred flesh could no longer hold up an incinerated pile of bones.
The head of the axe steamed in the wet mud with no more haft to hold it up. Simeon could hear the roaring of orcs all around them, their terrifying visage shimmering through the flames.
“What trick you got up your sleeve this time, Jaric?” The other man said pressing his robed back up against his friend.
“Quiet,” he replied. His eyes were closed and flickering swiftly under his aged lids. The heat of the walls around them made their brows sweat; Taryn wiped her weary brow with her hair. He spoke up, “doesn’t look like there will be a counter attack.”
“Are you serious?” The disappointment in his friend’s voice was palpable.
“Kids,” Jaric looked over Simeon and Taryn. “Either of you two have mold earth?” Simeon gave Taryn a nudge in the silence.
“I, I–” she tried to speak up.
“Good,” Jaric handed his staff to his friend and took her by both shoulders. “Concentrate right there,” he pointed over her shoulder to a place in the mud. “Concentrate, dig and spread the earth around to look like the mud around it.”
She trembled in his weathered but strong hands.
“Hurry,” he said into her ear. “The firewall won’t last much longer.”
She concentrated. She knew she didn’t have to, but after everything today it was all she could muster. The mud poured out of the hole she imagined and spread it into a thin pile nearby. The hole quickly filled with water.
“I can’t,” she said.
“Keep digging, deeper,” he assured her in the soft voice of experience.
After a few more rounds, the water was deep and murky. Simeon could see through the flames the silhouette of an orc necromancer, carrying a characteristic staff with skulls, kneeling over areas of where he previously saw battles. After a short moment of muttering one of the figures lying on the ground shambled to its feet and appeared to slough off like a dog, flinging bits of dark shadows that must have been mud. He hoped it was mud, he grimaced at the thought of what else it might be.
“After you two, hold your breaths,” Jaric whispered urgently to them.
Simeon wasted no time thinking about what was about to happen, he already had spent enough time thinking about what would happen when the walls came down. The water was as cold as death, if he knew what death was like. Strange, death all around me, yet so far from me, he thought as he slipped beneath the murky water and saw the light of day dim as he sank to the bottom of the well.
Taryn pressed closed to him, her cheeks puffed like a squirrel’s pouch. She hugged him. It was an odd feeling for him as she held him close and tight. Jaric and his friend descended next to them cramped in the small space of the make-shift well.
Jaric began the motions while holding his breath. Moving with the limited space, grabbing his staff tightly, he saved the verbal for last. Simeon could hear the spell through the water. It must have taken great skill and training to speak so clearly, but Jaric did not seem phased by the water pressing against his breath.
Simeon remembered talking to friends underwater as a kid, such a distant memory now. The spell sounded like that, only Jaric didn’t laugh, or exhale too quickly. He focused intently, making sure each utterance was perfect against the conditions.
The water pressed away from his chest and arms. His face dripped with dew. He couldn’t quite describe what he felt dimly lit from above. It wasn’t the mud, it seemed sturdier. Jaric leaned close to Taryn and whispered. Through the water above them the muffled sounds of orcs shouting sounded confused and chaotic.
“Now pull the mud over us.”
She squinted and grimaced and the light went out, everything was dark. Simeon began to breathe faster and panic but felt a firm hand against his chest calming him. Breathe, he thought.
Silence entombed them. They heard the pounding of heavy orc feet through the mud above them, but it sounded half-a-league away. Simeon must have imagined the flick of a finger because it was pitch black then, but quickly brightened; too bright at first, until his eyes adjusted. Jaric’s friend waved a hand over his focus and it emanated a soft mélange glow giving their crowded space pleasantness.
Not too far above his head he could see the mud arched over them like in the dome of a cathedral, but it abruptly followed down the sides where Taryn had not excavated. The mud shimmered back at them through the invisible force. Taryn hid her face against Simeon as she saw skeletal remains pressed into the mud from past battles.
“Tiny Hut?” he asked and scowled at the grotesque picture that illuminated around them.
“Yes,” Jaric replied. “Save your breath, kid.”
It felt dry in there, except he still felt wet. He put his arm around Taryn. He thought he could hear her sobbing into his soaking cloak.
Summary: Simeon Tor's family is renowned, and feared, for their reckless quest to discover the secrets of fire. No sooner than he graduated from a prestigious school of wizardry, did his country call him back to fight in a hundred year war against an orcish horde. Such is the fate of all from his homeland and his father, and his fathers before him never shied from a battle. Happenstance calls him and his new friends back to the academy. Greatly changed by the war, he struggles to relate to his old friends living peaceful lives due to their sacrifices. But, when he discovers a clue from his uncle regarding his family's greatest desire, the "eternal flame"; he and his companions must travel deep into the underworld facing horrors beyond anything they've ever seen before, and discover the origins of a war seemingly without end.
Chapter 1
Simeon slammed his back against the barricade which towered over him. He wasn’t sure if he soiled himself or if the cold ooze of the mud embraced him. He put down his hand to lean to the edge of the barricade, definitely was the mud this time, he thought.
Arrows, he recalled the commander's yell. Simeon could see his commander a mage hand away, pinned to the ground by one of the shafts.
“Must have let loose early,” Taryn said as she knocked the barricade a good inch with her shoulder. A few more of these arrows began to fall like the first drops of rain in his family’s garden. Simeon put the thought of home out of his mind.
“Where’s Gyr?” Simeon asked as he pressed his back against the barricade and tucked his knees into his chest. The wooden wall shuddered as an arrow with a head the size of a sword point slammed through the planks showering them with splinters.
“Best to sit an inch or two away,” she slapped his shoulder and they both slid through the mud and put some distance between the planks and their backs. Taryn raised her left arm and concentrated on Gyr. There was a cry through the blue dawn skies, which were beginning to overcast with black smoke. A flurry of light then whitewashed the morning and threw stark shadows everywhere Simeon looked.
“They have a warlock?” A ruddy faced man yelled rhetorically over to them from the barricade across the way. Gyr’s crumpled, little body fell into the mud. Just another of the many thuds that started to pound the muddy ground, sounding like a butter churn as the arrows began to come down in full.
Taryn’s eyes grew wide at the sight of Gyr lying in the mud like some worthless bird. She buried her face into her knees and listened to the hellish rain. Simeon watched as javelin sized arrows began to fill the ground around them like his sister's pin cushion. If one hit where another was already in the ground, it splintered the shaft, spraying Simeon’s face with bits of wood. He tucked his face against his knees and just wished he knew one of the gods those clerics always seem to pray to.
The sound of falling arrows began to quiet. Simeon could feel the hairs on his forearm get hot and he glanced down range over them. The arrows began to catch fire, like a sapling covered in pitch, and gave off the heat of several torches.
He tapped Taryn’s shoulder, “They plan to cook us.” He saw a glint of metal in the corner of his eye and looked to see a plate armored foot soldier, that had dropped his sword and shield, was making a mad dash for the trenches further down field. Like a rag doll hit by a stick, the shining armor was slammed into the mud and stuck there face down. Looking back over to her, he saw the ruddy faced man and another robed figure behind him, running from the nearby barricade to theirs.
His ruddy face never took eyes off them and in his hand he tightly gripped a worn staff held close and parallel to the ground. The top was a solid root ball polished by years of burnishing. The two of them hunched lower than the shafts of the arrows, ducking and weaving between the forest of improvised torches.
“Fark it’s hot, we can’t stay here,” the man said to Simeon and Taryn.
“Gyr?” She looked-up at him sobbing. The other man began to kick some of the flaming arrows over, stomping them flat into the mud. Simeon threw up his hood; the heat on his face became unbearable.
The man stood upright, almost as tall as his staff, and looked out to the owl, “He’s gone." Holding out his leather wrapped arm. “Jaric." Taryn grabbed his arm and he pulled her up out of the mud. Simeon got to his own feet and noticed that somehow their section seemed to be the only one not fallen into chaos. To either side of them massive green monsters were colliding with shielded men bracing each other. In some sections the two or three men were not enough to hold back the monster’s charge. Once the men were prone in the mud the creature’s great axe crushed, more than cut, into their helmets. In other sections the braced men took the hit and, regaining their stance, began to jab at the beasts with spears or swords.
“Jaric, Firewall,” the other man shouted. He waved his hands holding a small focus in one. Simeon could see his lips muttering something but couldn’t quite make out the words. His fingers flickered like flames and the palm of his hand pressed outward before he flattened it to face the ground. Sweeping his arm before him, Simeon felt the intense heat from the sides of the barricade.
Jaric began a similar evocation and Simeon could see a wall of fire rise up to his left, adding heat to the already unbearable forest of flames from the many arrows still standing around them. Jaric hit him square in the chest with his staff. He had seen the spell before and knew it, but he had never performed it other than to practice, certainly not under these conditions. He faced the remaining open side and could see a muscular green arm swing down a great axe that split a nearby caster in half.
It turned its ugly tusked face toward him and began to dash over. He wasn’t sure if his hand was moving correctly or if his words were well spoken. He took a piece of phosphorus in his hand, and before the orc could get to the line he envisioned before him, the fiery wall towered above them, anchoring the far ends of the other two into a triangle of fire.
Simeon looked down at his hands and noticed he was still holding on to the phosphorus for the spell. He looked over at Taryn who, looking like a chaotic mixture of tired and enraged, was shaking off the smoldering effects of her spell from her hands.
The orc burst through the flames, his hulking mass of flesh, now a smoldering mound, erupting into a blaze. “Move,” Jaric shouted. Simeon ducked just as a great axe smashed through the barricade getting stuck three-quarters of the length of the blade. In the moment of confusion on the orc’s face, Simeon rushed over to the group which now stood in the center of the flames.
Pulling on the haft, the orc followed Simeon with its gaping maw, spittle flying in his face, he knew this spell well. Shadows of orcs were visible on either sides of the fire that surrounded them; Jaric’s friend was kicking over what remained of the flaming arrows.
“It’s not just for smoking,” Simeon said to Taryn as she looked at him lighting up his churchwarden pipe. The bowl of pipe leaf burned with an aromatic that reminded her of her mother’s kitchen. He took a long draw on his focus and burned the leaf, concentrating just behind the barricade pointing two fingers with his freehand. An orb of fire no larger than a human skull formed alongside his palm. The orc screamed, its flesh melting from its burning bones. It pulled free the great axe and raised it high before taking a step toward them. The orb landed close behind the green beast and expanded brightly, as if Simeon had captured a burning sun and brought it to the earth. The orc vanished into shadows, eclipsed by the light. When the light dimmed and the roar quieted, the charred flesh could no longer hold up an incinerated pile of bones.
The head of the axe steamed in the wet mud with no more haft to hold it up. Simeon could hear the roaring of orcs all around them, their terrifying visage shimmering through the flames.
“What trick you got up your sleeve this time, Jaric?” The other man said pressing his robed back up against his friend.
“Quiet,” he replied. His eyes were closed and flickering swiftly under his aged lids. The heat of the walls around them made their brows sweat; Taryn wiped her weary brow with her hair. He spoke up, “doesn’t look like there will be a counter attack.”
“Are you serious?” The disappointment in his friend’s voice was palpable.
“Kids,” Jaric looked over Simeon and Taryn. “Either of you two have mold earth?” Simeon gave Taryn a nudge in the silence.
“I, I–” she tried to speak up.
“Good,” Jaric handed his staff to his friend and took her by both shoulders. “Concentrate right there,” he pointed over her shoulder to a place in the mud. “Concentrate, dig and spread the earth around to look like the mud around it.”
She trembled in his weathered but strong hands.
“Hurry,” he said into her ear. “The firewall won’t last much longer.”
She concentrated. She knew she didn’t have to, but after everything today it was all she could muster. The mud poured out of the hole she imagined and spread it into a thin pile nearby. The hole quickly filled with water.
“I can’t,” she said.
“Keep digging, deeper,” he assured her in the soft voice of experience.
After a few more rounds, the water was deep and murky. Simeon could see through the flames the silhouette of an orc necromancer, carrying a characteristic staff with skulls, kneeling over areas of where he previously saw battles. After a short moment of muttering one of the figures lying on the ground shambled to its feet and appeared to slough off like a dog, flinging bits of dark shadows that must have been mud. He hoped it was mud, he grimaced at the thought of what else it might be.
“After you two, hold your breaths,” Jaric whispered urgently to them.
Simeon wasted no time thinking about what was about to happen, he already had spent enough time thinking about what would happen when the walls came down. The water was as cold as death, if he knew what death was like. Strange, death all around me, yet so far from me, he thought as he slipped beneath the murky water and saw the light of day dim as he sank to the bottom of the well.
Taryn pressed closed to him, her cheeks puffed like a squirrel’s pouch. She hugged him. It was an odd feeling for him as she held him close and tight. Jaric and his friend descended next to them cramped in the small space of the make-shift well.
Jaric began the motions while holding his breath. Moving with the limited space, grabbing his staff tightly, he saved the verbal for last. Simeon could hear the spell through the water. It must have taken great skill and training to speak so clearly, but Jaric did not seem phased by the water pressing against his breath.
Simeon remembered talking to friends underwater as a kid, such a distant memory now. The spell sounded like that, only Jaric didn’t laugh, or exhale too quickly. He focused intently, making sure each utterance was perfect against the conditions.
The water pressed away from his chest and arms. His face dripped with dew. He couldn’t quite describe what he felt dimly lit from above. It wasn’t the mud, it seemed sturdier. Jaric leaned close to Taryn and whispered. Through the water above them the muffled sounds of orcs shouting sounded confused and chaotic.
“Now pull the mud over us.”
She squinted and grimaced and the light went out, everything was dark. Simeon began to breathe faster and panic but felt a firm hand against his chest calming him. Breathe, he thought.
Silence entombed them. They heard the pounding of heavy orc feet through the mud above them, but it sounded half-a-league away. Simeon must have imagined the flick of a finger because it was pitch black then, but quickly brightened; too bright at first, until his eyes adjusted. Jaric’s friend waved a hand over his focus and it emanated a soft mélange glow giving their crowded space pleasantness.
Not too far above his head he could see the mud arched over them like in the dome of a cathedral, but it abruptly followed down the sides where Taryn had not excavated. The mud shimmered back at them through the invisible force. Taryn hid her face against Simeon as she saw skeletal remains pressed into the mud from past battles.
“Tiny Hut?” he asked and scowled at the grotesque picture that illuminated around them.
“Yes,” Jaric replied. “Save your breath, kid.”
It felt dry in there, except he still felt wet. He put his arm around Taryn. He thought he could hear her sobbing into his soaking cloak.
“Sorry about Gyr.”
Next: Chapter 2 - Mines and Countermines - https://www.dndbeyond.com/forums/d-d-beyond-general/story-lore/34796-simeon-tor-chapter-2-mines-and-countermines
Read the first chapters. Feel free to critique. Will link the next chapters at the end of the first. Two stories running so far.
Simeon Tor:
https://www.dndbeyond.com/forums/d-d-beyond-general/story-lore/34598-simeon-tor-chapter-1-the-heat-of-battle
The Heart of the Drow:
https://www.dndbeyond.com/forums/d-d-beyond-general/story-lore/36014-heart-of-the-drow-chapter-1
Finally was able to get around to editing Chapter 1, thanks to those who already read it. But, now it will read much better.
Read the first chapters. Feel free to critique. Will link the next chapters at the end of the first. Two stories running so far.
Simeon Tor:
https://www.dndbeyond.com/forums/d-d-beyond-general/story-lore/34598-simeon-tor-chapter-1-the-heat-of-battle
The Heart of the Drow:
https://www.dndbeyond.com/forums/d-d-beyond-general/story-lore/36014-heart-of-the-drow-chapter-1
Added a poll, figuring that will help people give feedback so I can improve.
Read the first chapters. Feel free to critique. Will link the next chapters at the end of the first. Two stories running so far.
Simeon Tor:
https://www.dndbeyond.com/forums/d-d-beyond-general/story-lore/34598-simeon-tor-chapter-1-the-heat-of-battle
The Heart of the Drow:
https://www.dndbeyond.com/forums/d-d-beyond-general/story-lore/36014-heart-of-the-drow-chapter-1