Jorek Driftglass – Wreck-Salvage Diver

Name: Jorek Driftglass
Race: Human
Role/Class: Wreck-Salvage Diver
Appearance: Jorek Driftglass looks like a man carved by salt and bad decisions. He’s lean and hard-muscled, with weathered skin, cracked knuckles, and a jaw that’s been broken at least once and healed slightly crooked. His hair is sun-bleached and cut short, but it never lies flat—always stiff with brine. His eyes are a pale slate color, cold and alert, and they don’t rest on faces for long; they flick instead to hands, belts, exits, and edges.

He dresses like someone who expects to be wet and bleeding: a heavy leather diving vest reinforced with stitched plates, a coil of rope slung cross-body, and a knife sheath strapped to his forearm for quick draws underwater. Around his neck hangs a shard of cloudy sea-glass on a cord—his “driftglass”—worn smooth by years of touch. His gear smells of tar, kelp, and old iron.

Backstory

In Heathdun, salvage is a trade and a temptation. Jorek grew up dockside, watching wreck crews return with crates of soaked spices, dented coin-chests, and the occasional corpse they pretended not to see. By sixteen, he was diving the reef shallows with a rope around his waist and a knife in his teeth, cutting cargo loose before the tide could grind it into splinters.

He got good—dangerously good.

Jorek learned how to read currents, how to time breaths, how to wedge a crowbar just right so a hatch gives before the sea takes your shoulder out of its socket. He also learned the uglier rules: some wrecks are “claimed,” some reefs are “owned,” and some finds are worth killing for before they ever reach a lift cage.

The name Driftglass stuck after a dive where Jorek surfaced with his face shredded by a shattered porthole—blood and sea-glass glittering in his beard stubble like frost. He lived. The crewman who cut his line didn’t.

Now Jorek operates half inside Heathdun’s economy and half outside it. He sells salvage through brokers when it suits him, moves goods quietly when it doesn’t, and keeps a private cache somewhere along the cliff shelves—items he won’t show anyone, no matter the coin. Rumor says he found something in a wreck that shouldn’t exist off the Bluffs: a sealed crate marked with no crest, no manifest, and no rot despite years beneath the waves.

Jorek doesn’t talk about it.

But he’s started sleeping with a knife in hand.