Ushka Slagmend - Forge-Warden of Ash'rift
At the farthest ritual forge-camp on the upper Ashen Plains, orc forge-warden Ushka Slagmend keeps the last fire between Ash'rift and the grey - mending caravan steel, feeding strangers, and judging everyone by what they carry back through the ash.
Introduction
The last ring of heat before the grey belongs to one orc. Where the Sorrowfall Mountains run out and Ash'rift's ground tips down into the upper Ashen Plains, somebody has to plant a forge out on the open ash and keep it burning — an anvil, a tapped vent, and a fire that says this far, at least, is still ours. Ushka Slagmend has held the farthest of those camps longer than anyone expected her to, and she has never once described it as an honor. In Ash'rift, saying a thing has never been how you prove it.
Profile
Name: Ushka Slagmend
Race: Orc
Gender: Female
Alignment: Lawful Neutral
Role/Class: Forge-Warden of Ash'rift
Challenge Rating: 3
"Don't tell me what you'll do. Come back with the ash still on you, and I'll believe you."
Appearance: Ushka is broad through the shoulders and built low to the ground, the way people get when they have spent thirty years lifting things that were never meant to be lifted alone. Grey ash has worked so far into her green-grey skin that washing only changes the shade of it. Old burn scars map her forearms and one side of her jaw in pale, glassy streaks, and her plate — ash-tempered, refit a dozen times by her own hand — is darkened to the color of cooled slag, with the heat-bloom of the vents still colored into the pauldrons. A squat iron ember-pot hangs at her hip on a short chain and never goes cold. She carries a six-foot vent-bar across her back the way other soldiers carry a spear, and she leans on it more often than she swings it.
