What if I'm far from home? Oh brother, I will hear you call What if I lose it all? Oh sister, I will help you out Oh, if the sky comes falling down, for you There's nothing in this world I wouldn't do
I probably couldn’t actually play these two as DnD characters, because they’re pretty entwined, unless I just picked one of them for a campaign--picking one would be the really hard part. (They are separated as of their “starting” points, so that much would be easy, but giving the other up as a character....) But I was bitten really hard for then this evening, so I figured I might as well write them up.
Gyrda was a hill dwarf born into the Hardhelm clan, proud keepers of the storied history of their dwarven hold. Their hold was an open one, and more of its people were merchants, facilitating trade between the surface world above and the deep-buried isolationist dwarven holds below, than were crafters or miners or warriors. They were more open-minded, more welcoming of new ideas, than most dwarves, and when from a young age Gyrda showed not just the scholarly bent of the Hardhelms but an outright fascination with the nature of the surface world, she was encouraged in her interests. She was allowed to make excursions to the surface, to study its flora and fauna in person, for her clan thought that it would be to their benefit for her to expand their knowledge while she was still young and unattached enough to embark on such expeditions without disrupting the clan’s work. But she was still a dwarf; once she hit fifty or sixty, they assumed, she would settle down underground, compile her findings for the Hardhammer archives, and then take up her proper task of recording the events of the clan and indexing its histories. None knew that her fascination with the natural world above had as much to do with the dryad friends she’d made there as with the forest itself.
The concept of names for people, places, and tribes strikes firbolg as strange, but to the wood elves and forest gnomes who dwelled nearby, the lack would have caused distress and confusion, and therefore his tribe used those species’ style of names in dealings that required such monikers. Therefore, when he asked, they let the young firbolg choose the elven name Eirelis, against the time when he might someday have to speak to their occasional allies in the protection of the forest. More social and inquisitive than most of his kind, Eirelis often crept out of the forest depths that his tribe occupied and protected, lurking at the edges of the elven and gnomish settlements that fringed the Wood in order to study their ways. He was also close friends with the many dryads who lived in the woods, and those on the edges helped him understand the people he observed, even when he felt too shy to go among them. His tribe was unsettled by his frequent journeys to the fringes, but they’d been cautious allies of both the gnomes and the elves for centuries, and they trusted the fey folk of the wood to keep an eye on Eirelis and prevent him from exposing their existence to foreigners or come himself to harm among them.
In her twenties, Gyrda was a young woman (though with strong emphasis on the young, from a dwarven point of view), while Eirelis, barely into his second decade, was still an adolescent when the great stone fell from the sky and, in its landing, set the forest ablaze. Much of the firbolg tribe was no doubt killed in the first few moments, but Eirelis, once again on the fringes of the forest, had time to flee from the worst of the inferno. So did Gyrda, who had been studying the patterns of the falling leaves in the forest when the flames suddenly roared dwon upon her. They ran to the same place, the dryads’ grove--Eirelis seeking protection from those he’d always looked up to as guides and guardians, Gyrda in the desperate hope that she could somehow save her tree-bound friends. They stumbled into the grove, the firbolg first, the dwarf minutes later, and as the fire encircled the dryads, they did the only thing they could to protect their mortal friends: they twisted the planes around them, transporting the entire grove and those within it into the Feywild.
Portals between the planes require a close similarity between the terrain of one plane and the other, and so, with the fire speeding through the dryads’ grove, it was a one-way trip. Many of the dryads did not survive, unable to fully transition to their Feywild habitations before the fire burned away too much of their essence on the Material Plane, and by the time they had been fully dragged through, Eirelis and Gyrda had both been badly burnt. They might not have survived had they not been found by curious eladrin, who carried them home to the Seelie Court and healed their wounds. There was no going home for either of them, said the mercurial eladrin noble who took them into his household, and so they might as well make themselves at home as Cildraele’s children.
The fire had been much worse for Eirelis; he was badly traumatized by the loss of his forest and his whole tribe, and he clung to Gyrda like a constant shadow. He couldn’t bring himself to speak to all these strangers, and so he and Gyrda developed between them a sort of simple language of gestures and signs. For her part, Gyrda fell easily into the role of guardian for the young firbolg, seized with a fierce compassion and affection for this child who seemed to trust only her, and the few remaining dryads, and no one else. They were bonded more closely together by their life in a fey-lord’s household, for while some of the eladrin were at times kind, at other times they were cold, or bitter, or cruel, and most of the other fey might be gracious or gentle but seemed to see kindness as an alien mortal flaw. As the only mortals among them, Gyrda and Eirelis had to struggle to survive the endless machinations of the household, and not even Cildraele himself was always a safe point of anchor. The sense of alienation was the worst part to Gyrda, who did not have even the trace of fey blood that Eirelis had to anchor herself in the Feywild, and she spent as much time with the dryads, who had at least dwelled on the Material Plane, as she could without neglecting Eirelis.
Time moves strangely in the Feywild, the more so by mortals who are affected by it. Though it seemed to Gyrda that she trained as a druid for years, with the eladrin and the dryads and other, stranger fey brought in to tutor her, and while Eirelis grew and grew until he was nearly an adult, she never quite seemed to age. Into her thirties, perhaps, for her beard grew in full and some of the lines of her face refined themselves, but once she’d reached them she hung there for all that time that seemed to run on and on but that she couldn’t quite track. And Eirelis seemed to reach that near-adulthood, old enough for stubble but not quite old enough for a full beard, and then hang there too. It ate at Gyrda. Not very much at first, for she was immersed in a study of nature deeper and fuller than any she could have pursued at home, and in the learning of magics and secrets that she had never thought a dwarf could learn. If it had only been herself, perhaps it never would have crossed her mind. But in time she realized that Eirelis, while he’d grown, and while he’d healed in body from his terrible burns, never had seemed to have healed in mind; he still could not speak, still shied away from even a candle’s flame, still curled up in her bed at night and wept silent, shuddering tears, every night that passed, over and over again for what might have been weeks or might have been years. Cildraele waved it off, no matter how often she asked, and while for a while she took his word for it, in time her own education made clear that this was wrong.
She began to study further, not just into nature, or into magic, or into the planes. And finally, carelessly, in passing, one of her tutors dropped enough to make it clear: in the Feywild, time did not run right, as she’d suspected. And in the Feywild, her brother would not heal. Nor would Gyrda grow and mature into the full wisdom of either dwarf or druid, though that seemed to her a lesser trouble. Here, they would be Cildraele’s children forever, and neither could grow and change, for this wasn’t their plane and they could not fall in sync with its patterns.
This time, she didn’t speak to Cildraele. It was clear that he knew what had been the problem, all along. They were showpieces, almost property: look at these mortals that Cildraele had saved, look at his children, look at these pampered, decorated jewels of his household. Now that Gyrda looked at it from a new perspective, she could tell. And Eirelis, he was eventually able to communicate to her, had known even longer than she had--he just hadn’t wanted to trouble her, not when she’d been so buried in her learning, not when it had brought her such joy.
So Gyrda further shifted the course of her study, learning about the planes and the portals between them. It would take more power than she currently had as a druid--or that she could gain here in Cildraele’s household, in this perpetual youth that she’d been locked in--to actually open a portal back to Material Plane. But she learned enough about the making of them to learn the details of how the dryads had brought her and Eirelis here. And so at last she asked them. They had saved her and her brother once; enough time had passed in the Material Plane for the forest to begin to recover, so had they regained their strength, and did they have once again the connection required to do it again?
They had, and they did, and, since it was her and Eirelis asking, they would. They prepared for a secret departure, under cover of darkness. But perhaps they were seen, or perhaps her tutor realized the bent of her questions, or perhaps Cildraele was simply even more powerful than he had seemed. For as they stood in the center of the grove, enmeshed in the power of the dryads, watching the portal open before them--Cildraele appeared, resplendent in his anger. He scolded at first, the indulgent father forced to withdraw his favor, and then coaxed and pleaded, a concerned parent trying to dissuade his children from a course of action; and when Eirelis took Gyrda’s hand and tugged her towards the portal he finally lashed out, striking out with the power of a fey-lord at them both. Gyrda did her best to shield Eirelis, taking the brunt of the assault, and was thrust through the portal by the force of it; her last sight of Eirelis was of Cildraele’s bindings settling around him, pulling him back so that he could not follow. And then she was sent careening through the Ethereal Plane, the portal distorted and disordered enough by Cildraele’s power that Gyrda came back through not in whatever had grown up in the forest that she’d known, but in rocky badlands so far away that not a soul she spoke to in the following days knew of the dwarven hold, or the forest, or even the surrounding nation that she remembered from her childhood.
As for his part, Eirelis was caught firm in Cildraele’s bindings, forced to watch in stillness as his sister was sent hurtling into darkness. From what he saw--the shadows and stone that were all he made out of where she landed--she had been sent straight through the earth into the Underdark. But he could learn no more, for Cildraele gathered him close, once again the gentle and soothing parent who had rescued his child from potential harm, and took him home. Eirelis was wrapped in magic, in bindings and glamours and spells to make him settle and make him forget, and he might have stayed trapped forever, locked in nameless fear and mysterious mistrust, if one of Cildraele’s enemies hadn’t seen in the over-protected firbolg child a point of weakness in the eladrin’s armor. The rival had no concern for Eirelis himself, only a desire to distract Cildraele so that he would be vulnerable in the machinations of the Court, but the end result was the same: the other eladrin snapped the bindings, dispelled the glamours, undid the spells, and snatched Eirelis up as a hostage. Her escape, however, took her through the Ethereal Plane (in order that the kidnapping not be traced back to her), and as he was being carried away, Eirelis gathered up his courage and bolted during a moment of inattention. He fled through the murky mists of the Ethereal until he fell, perhaps by the power of his dormant fey blood and his own desire, back into the Material Plane.
Like his sister, Eirelis ended up in an unknown land, a cold evergreen forest unlike any woods he had ever known on a mountainside that towered over the rolling hills he’d once known. He stumbled through the snow until he was spotted and rescued by some dwarves, but not dwarves Gyrda or the clans she’d described--these were sturdy mountain dwarves, comfortable with the cold but preferring the depths of the mountain tunnels far below. They took Eirelis in out of pity, but their lives were hard, and they could not support an unknown, silent being who could do no useful work. Rather than cast him out, they chose to teach him: first simple tasks, stitching clothes and cleaning pots and doing anything else that kept him well away from fire, and then, later, when he began to build strength and muscle, the combat arts. He didn’t have the physical courage or sheer stamina needed to be a front-line fighter, holding the line with a shield or charging into the foe with an axe, but he had the patience and stealth needed to learn the bow and become an effective hunter.
In time Eirelis even began to speak, a little, though he would ever be more comfortable expressing himself with actions and gestures. In the long cold nights with the other dwarven hunters, he told them bits and pieces of his life, confused by his trembling grasp on language and the long-scarred hurts of his mind: that he had lost his first family in fire but had gained from that horror a new sister, a dwarf, and a terrible adoptive father from whom they both had fled, and how his sister had been cast into a darkness that could only be the Underdark in her efforts to protect him. And how he had to find her someday, if he could, and make up to her all that she’d spent and lost for his sake.
The dwarves listened solemnly (as they did almost everything, for these were a dour folk), and talked quietly later among themselves. They waited a while, for Eirelis was young, and uncertain, and had barely just started growing out his beard. But in time, when his beard had reached a handspan’s length, and he was so tall that he had to hunch nearly double to navigate their rude tunnels, a few of them took him aside, and told him that they had new training for him, and led him down secret and well-secured tunnels into the top crusts of the Underdark. There they trained him in more arts than just those of a hunter: not just stealth but ambush, not just perception but the art of true darkvision, not just simple tricks and traps but deep and secret magic. And when he’d showed a firm grasp on all of these, they told him that he was free to go--that he had always been free to go, though they weren’t sure if he’d known that, but that now he could go not only freely but safely, and have a good chance in the Underdark, if that was what he desired.
And that was indeed what Eirelis desired. He would set out into the Underdark, and search it and the places on the surface that it would sometimes rise up to touch, turning over every stone and breaking into every darkened prison until he found Gyrda.
In the meantime, for the two years and counting since she’d been flung into the badlands, Gyrda had been seeking out the forests she loved and the fey who dwelled in them, searching relentlessly for a portal back into the Feywild, where she had left Eirelis.
Time ran differently in the Feywild, after all, and they’d separately learned that the era they’d known had been centuries past. There was nothing here on the Material Plane that they could go back to, no one who would know their faces or their names, except for each other.
---
Gyrda: Hill Dwarf
Ability Score Increase: Constitution +2, Wisdom +1
Age: Late 30s (dwarven young adult).
Size: Medium. 4′5″ and about 140 pounds.
Speed: Base walking speed is 25 feet, and heavy armor does not reduce speed.
Darkvision: within 60 feet.
Dwarven Resilience: Advantage on saving throws against poison, resistance to poison damage.
Stonecunning: Double proficiency bonus to History checks relating to stonework.
Dwarven Toughness: Your hit point maximum increases by 1, and increases again by 1 every level.
Dwarven Combat Training: Proficiency with battleaxe, handaxe, light hammer, and warhammer.
Tool Proficiency: Brewer’s tools.
Alignment: Neutral Good.
Languages: Common and Dwarvish.
Eirelis: Firbolg
Ability Score Increase: Wisdom +2, Strength +1
Age: Early 30s (firbolg young adult).
Size: Medium. 7′4″ and about 270 pounds.
Speed: Base walking speed is 30 feet.
Powerful Build: You count as one size larger when determining carrying capacity and the weight you can push, drag, or lift.
Firbolg Magic: Once per short rest, can cast either Detect Magic or Disguise Self* (*can appear up to 3 feet shorter), using Wisdom as your spellcasting ability.
Hidden Step: Once per short rest, as a bonus action, you can turn magically invisible until the start of your next turn or until you attack, make a damage roll, or force someone to make a saving throw.
Speech of Beast and Leaf: Beasts and plants can understand the meaning of your words, though you have no special ability to understand them in return, and you have advantage on all Charisma checks to influence them.
Alignment: Neutral Good.
Languages: Common, Elvish, and Giant.
Gyrda: Druid (Circle of Dreams)
armor proficiencies: light armor, medium armor, shields (no armor or shields made of metal)
weapon proficiencies: clubs, daggers, darts, javelins, maces, quarterstaffs, scimitars, sickles, slings, spears
save proficiencies: Intelligence, Wisdom
tool proficiencies: Herbalism kit
skill proficiencies: Insight, Nature
language proficiency: Druidic
starting equipment: wooden shield, wooden club, leather armor, explorer’s pack, druidic focus (a yew wand from one of the dryads’ trees; also her treasured item)
guiding aspect: Yew trees remind you of renewing your mind and spirit, letting the old die and the new spring forth.
mentor: Your favorite tutor was the eldest of the dryads who survived the transition to the Feywild. During your training, she taught you the importance of moving forward and the natural cycle of birth and death.
Eirelis: Ranger (Gloom Stalker)
armor proficiencies: light armor, medium armor, shields
weapon proficiencies: simple weapons, martial weapons
save proficiencies: Strength, Dexterity
skill proficiencies: Animal Handling, Nature, Stealth
language proficiency: Sylvan (from favored enemy)
starting equipment: leather armor, two shortswords, a dungeoneer’s pack, a longbow, and a quiver of 20 arrows
views of the world: Visiting a town is not unpleasant, but after a few days I feel the irresistible call to return to the wild.
homeland: You patrolled an ancient forest, made mysterious and wild by many fey creatures and crossings to the Feywild.
favored (sworn) enemy: Fey. You seek revenge on your own and your sister’s behalf for the great transgressions your foe has committed.
Gyrda: Sage background
skill proficiencies: Arcana, History
languages: Elvish, Sylvan
equipment: a bottle of black ink, a quill, a small knife, a letter from a now long-dead cousin posing a question about dryads’ children that you have not been able to answer, a set of common clothes, and a pouch containing 10 gp
feature: Researcher (if you do not know a piece of lore, you likely know where or from whom you can obtain it)
Personality Traits:
I’m used to helping out those who aren’t as smart as I am, and I patiently explain anything and everything to others.
There’s nothing I like more than a good mystery.
I’m willing to listen to every side of an argument before I make my own judgement.
Whenever I come to a new place, I collect local rumors and spread gossip. (from Entertainer)
I have a lesson for every situation, drawn from observing nature. (from Outlander)
I’m always polite and respectful. (from Soldier)
Ideals:
Beauty: What is beautiful points us beyond itself toward what is true.
Greater Good: My gifts are meant to be shared with all, not used for my own benefit. (from Hermit)
Change: Life is like the seasons, in constant change, and we must change with it. (from Outlander)
Bonds:
I’ve been searching my whole life for the answer to a certain question.
I have a family, but I have no idea where they are. One day, I hope to see them again. (from Folk Hero)
An injury to the unspoiled wilderness of my home is an injury to me. (from Outlander)
Flaws:
I am easily distracted by the promise of information.
I overlook obvious solutions in favor of complicated ones.
I can’t keep a secret to save my life, or anyone else’s.
I’d risk too much to uncover a lost bit of knowledge. (from Hermit)
Eirelis: Outlander background
skill proficiencies: Athletics, Survival
tool proficiencies: Pan flute
languages: Dwarvish
equipment: a staff, a hunting trap, a trophy pair of deer’s antlers, a set of traveler’s clothes, and a pouch containing 10 gp
feature: Wanderer (can recall general geography, and can feed up to five people per day off the land)
Personality Traits:
I place no stock in wealthy or well-mannered folk. Money and manners won’t save you from a hungry owlbear.
I’m always picking things up, absently fiddling with them, and sometimes accidentally breaking them.
I feel far more comfortable around animals than people.
I am incredibly slow to trust. Those who seem the fairest often have the most to hide. (from Criminal)
I’ve been isolated for so long that I rarely speak, preferring gestures and the occasional grunt. (from Hermit)
I hide scraps of food and trinkets away in my pockets. (from Urchin)
Ideals:
Nature: The natural world is more important than all the constructs of civilization.
Independence: I must prove that I can handle myself without the coddling of my family. (from Noble)
People: I help the people who help me--that’s what keeps us alive. (from Urchin)
Bonds:
My family is the most important thing in my life, even when they are far from me.
I am the last of my tribe, and it is up to me to ensure their names enter legend.
I owe a debt I can never repay to the person who took pity on me. (from Urchin)
Flaws:
I am slow to trust members of other races, tribes, and societies.
I judge others harshly, and myself even more severely. (from Acolyte)
I like keeping secrets and won’t share them with anyone. (from Hermit)
My hatred of my enemies is blind and unreasoning. (from Soldier)
