What this saga is

If you want the simple version, The Monk and the Witch is a free, noncommercial Dungeons & Dragons fan-saga set in the Forgotten Realms, centered on two original characters: Ṛṣiśūra, a Mercy monk, and Maeril Greenward, an abjurer-witch of thresholds, wards, food, green life, and stubborn protection.

But that is only the surface.

This page is about what the saga is as a real creative work: why I wrote it, what it means to me, and what kind of experience you are being invited into as a reader.

A free Dungeons & Dragons fan-saga

The Monk and the Witch is unofficial fan fiction.

It is not approved by, endorsed by, or connected to Wizards of the Coast, Hasbro, Dungeons & Dragons, or the official Forgotten Realms publishing line.

It is free.

It is noncommercial.

It exists because I love Dungeons & Dragons, the Forgotten Realms, the old feeling of vast campaign settings, strange cities, roads, gods, monsters, temples, wounds, taverns, books, magic, and original characters who can step into that world and matter.

The Forgotten Realms is not mine.

Dungeons & Dragons is not mine.

But Ṛṣi and Maeril are mine in the way original characters become part of an author’s inner life. They are the characters I was looking for: not borrowed heroes, not replacements for famous icons, but two people close enough to my own heart that writing them felt like turning love, fear, faith, discipline, marriage, care, darkness, and hope into myth.

Not a campaign log

This saga comes from Dungeons & Dragons, but it is not a campaign transcript.

It is not a record of dice rolls.

It is not a sequence of sessions rewritten with prettier sentences.

The goal was to take the emotional force of a campaign — the laughter, grief, romance, horror, absurdity, triumph, fear, tenderness, and strange little moments that only happen at a table — and shape it into prose that could live on the page.

The D&D soul matters.

The rules matter.

The Forgotten Realms matter.

But the story is not about mechanics. It is about what those mechanics feel like when translated into lived experience: a wound being cleaned, a spell catching at the right instant, a body stepping between danger and someone smaller, a ward holding because someone prepared it with love.

The characters I was looking for

I have wanted original characters who truly belonged to me for a long time.

Not because I wanted to own a setting.

Because I wanted people I could carry in my heart.

Ṛṣi and Maeril became those characters.

Ṛṣi is not just “a monk.” He is a man of discipline, mercy, body, breath, pain, restraint, martial training, and practical care. He is not detached from the world. He is trying to become trustworthy inside it.

Maeril is not just “a witch.” She is warmth with teeth. She cooks, protects, studies, jokes, worries, burns, loves, and refuses to become harmless merely because she is kind. Her magic is not decoration. It is how she draws boundaries around life and says: this must be protected.

Together, they became the center of the saga.

Not as saint and temptation.

Not as monk and seductress.

Not as hero and love interest.

They are the protagonist unit: mercy and ward, body and spell, stillness and spark, discipline and delight, road and threshold.

Their relationship is not a subplot.

It is the engine.

Love in a world too large

At its deepest level, The Monk and the Witch is about being an adult in a world too large for you.

A world of war, crisis, money pressure, climate fear, loneliness, systems, violence, exhaustion, institutions, technology, faith, grief, and suffering that no single person can fix.

A world where love does not make the danger disappear.

A world where love makes indifference impossible.

Ṛṣi and Maeril are my way of entering that question through fantasy.

How do you live when the world is too big?

How do you care without being destroyed by care?

How do you love someone without trying to own them?

How do you help without turning yourself into the only answer?

How do you keep your teeth without becoming cruel?

The saga begins with a very small act: a monk takes a beating so a child can run, and a witch feeds people on a bridge.

But mercy, once taken seriously, cannot remain small.

It becomes soup.

Then shelter.

Then writing.

Then roads.

Then wards.

Then family.

Then consequence.

Then the question of whether one body should ever have to bear the whole wound alone.

Darkness, but not despair

This story has darkness in it.

Violence, grief, trauma, injury, death, fear, guilt, and moral consequence are part of the saga. The world is not clean. The characters are not untouched. Care does not always arrive in time. Love does not make every choice safe.

But this is not despair fantasy.

The darkness is not there because I believe darkness is the deepest truth.

It is there because suffering is real, and because care only matters if it enters the places where suffering actually lives.

This saga is dark enough to admit that people bleed.

It is also stubborn enough to believe that soup matters.

A cleaned wound matters.

A joke after terror matters.

A warm room matters.

A hand that does not become a fist matters.

A ward prepared before disaster matters.

A love that survives consequence matters.

The story is not about pretending the world is kind.

It is about asking what kind of people we become when we choose kindness anyway — not as softness, but as practice.

Faith, care, and practice

Faith matters in this saga.

Not as simple doctrine.

Not as preaching.

But as lived practice.

Ṛṣi’s mercy is shaped by suffering, discipline, compassion, restraint, and the question of what his hands are for. Maeril’s witchcraft is shaped by thresholds, nature, food, wards, memory, anger, and protection. Other characters carry their own gods, vows, doubts, failures, and forms of devotion.

The saga is interested in faith when it becomes action.

A prayer that feeds someone.

A vow that changes how a body moves.

A god who is not just a name, but a pressure inside a choice.

A temple that matters because it has beds before icons.

A spell that matters because someone prepared it before fear could make the decision.

Mercy is not an idea here.

Mercy is something done.

What kind of reading experience this is

This is a long saga.

It is character-centered.

It is emotionally serious.

It is romantic, physical, practical, sometimes funny, sometimes painful, and deeply rooted in Dungeons & Dragons.

It is not written to be a fast commercial fantasy product.

It is not optimized to explain everything quickly.

It asks you to care about original characters inside a beloved shared world.

It asks you to let ordinary acts carry weight: cooking, bandaging, walking, training, copying pages, checking breath, mending tools, building a place where others can survive.

It also asks you to accept that the story will grow.

What begins as a monk, a witch, a road, and a bridge eventually becomes a saga about cities, families, gods, monsters, memory, death, return, consequence, and the difficult maturity of mercy.

The heart remains the same.

Ṛṣi and Maeril.

Mercy and wards.

Love in a world too large.

Where to start

Start with Book 1: Mercy and Wards.

It begins small on purpose.

A boy in an alley.

A monk who steps in.

A witch who watches.

A bowl of soup.

A bridge.

A hall.

A question neither of them fully understands yet.

That is the first threshold.

Everything else grows from there.

Earlier echoes

Before The Monk and the Witch, I had already tried to write this kind of emotional shape in other forms: dark original-character fiction, impossible love, wounded people, magic, violence, tenderness, and the search for characters who felt truly mine.

Those earlier works are not required reading. They are rougher, darker, and belong to earlier parts of my life. But they are part of the path that eventually led here.

For curious readers, they can be found here:

• Shadowrun: Electrochoc
• Feybound: A Dance of Shadows

A final note

I wrote this because the characters became real enough to deserve a finished shape.

I wrote it because Dungeons & Dragons gave me a language for myth, danger, faith, monsters, friendship, wounds, and impossible love.

I wrote it because I wanted original characters I could carry in my heart.

I wrote it because the world is too large, and I needed a story about care that does not pretend otherwise.

If you read it, I hope you find what I was trying to put there:

not perfection,

not official canon,

not a product,

but a saga made with love, discipline, fear, humor, darkness, faith, and teeth.