Torrik Flintvein – Deep-Lode Prospector
“The rock doesn’t hate you. It just remembers what you forgot.”
Name: Torrik Flintvein
Race: Dwarf
Role/Class: Deep-Lode Prospector
Appearance: Torrik Flintvein is lean for a dwarf, with a narrow frame and a weathered face that looks carved rather than aged. His beard is a braided, iron-gray wedge kept tight against his chest, threaded with thin slivers of polished shale that click softly when he moves. His eyes are dark amber and always scanning—never the horizon, always the ground, the wall seams, the way a beam sits against stone.
His clothes are the practical layers of a working prospector: a rugged canvas coat patched at the elbows, salt-stiff trousers, and a thick belt loaded with chalk, pitons, and small glass vials of mineral dust. His boots are wrapped with extra straps for cliff paths. A light crossbow rides his back, but the tool he touches most is a short, blunt-headed hammer used not for fighting, but for listening—tapping stone and reading what answers back.
He smells faintly of wet rock, lamp oil, and iron.
Backstory
Torrik was once one of Thorn’del’s most promising tunnel bosses—fast, fearless, and proud. Then a new gallery collapsed under his watch. The official cause was “unforeseen stress.” Torrik never accepted that.
He spent months returning to the sealed site, mapping fissures the engineers ignored, and learning to hear the subtle “speech” of stone under pressure: the faint creak before a buckle, the dry tick of a fracture spreading, the hollow ring that means water is waiting behind a wall.
Torrik’s obsession made him unwelcome in polite guild halls. He started taking work outside the city-forges—walking the Briarthorn cliff faces, climbing half-abandoned veins, and prospecting the bluffs where salt wind and rain reveal new seams after every storm. He sells ore when he must, but what he truly trades is information: where the mountain is stable, where it isn’t, and what the rock is trying to warn people about.
Some call him superstitious. Brunna Ashmantle calls him useful.
He has a private theory that the Bluffs don’t merely crack—they shift on purpose, slowly, like a sleeping creature adjusting in its bed.
