Thornik - The Archaeologist
"The past is buried for a reason — which is precisely why I insist on digging it up."
Name: Thornik
Race: Rock Gnome
Class/Role: Level 7 Rogue (Inquisitive) / Level 2 Artificer
Appearance: Thornik is a compact, wiry gnome with a wild tuft of salt-and-pepper hair sprouting like a plume from beneath his cracked leather expedition cap. His face is weathered and smudged with soot, but his amber eyes gleam with manic intelligence behind thick, brass-framed goggles with magnification lenses that click into place. His patchwork coat is covered in stitched pockets and faded expedition tags from digs across Gaiathrae. Around his neck hangs a broken arcane symbol — the Shattered Sigil — which he discovered in a ruin and has obsessively studied ever since.
Backstory
Thornik hails from a deep-mining guild in the foothills of The Shattered Coast, but he left the clan’s forges behind after uncovering a buried vault during a routine tunnel dig — a vault that wasn’t meant to be found. Inside was a fragment of a forgotten arcane symbol and a riddle written in a lost dialect of Draconic. Since that day, he’s traveled from the sunken ziggurats of the Endless Expanse to the scorched fields of Emberfall, chasing lost languages, dead gods, and puzzle-box tombs. A respected (and infamous) figure among academic circles, Thornik is both revered and loathed for his reckless dives into cursed ruins and his unshakable belief that the "Shattered Sigil" was part of a primordial myth erased from the world.
