Zurek Grale - Caravan Master of Ash'rift

Introduction

Nothing about the roads out of Ash'rift is kind. Northeast they climb toward the Cinderfen Range and the rotting wilds beyond it; west they thread the Sorrowfall Mountains toward Sorrowind Pass and the mournful lands past that; southwest they run a long, punishing arc across the upper Ashen Plains toward Andisol's greenhouses. Ash'rift sends few caravans down any of them. The ones it sends come home. Zurek Grale has walked at the head of the lead wagon for nineteen years, through ash storms that swallow sound whole and roads that stop being roads, and in all nineteen he has never once turned his people toward water.

Profile

Name: Zurek Grale, called "Dry-Mouth"
Race: Half-Orc
Gender: Male
Alignment: Lawful Neutral
Role/Class: Caravan Master of Ash'rift
Challenge Rating: 3

"Out there, water is a lie something tells you. We carry ours. We drink on my word. And we get home."

Appearance: Zurek is a heavy-shouldered half-orc gone grey at the temples, his green skin dulled to the colour of cooled ash by two decades of grit worked permanently into every scar and crease. His lower tusks are chipped short and his lips are cracked to the point of bleeding no matter the season, which is the first thing most travelers notice and the last thing they ask about. He wears a layered ash-veil of wound cloth around throat and shaved skull, a band of smoked slagglass lenses pushed up on his forehead until the wind turns, and a long road-coat of blisterbark-tanned hide whose hem has burnt away to a ragged fringe. A knotted cord hangs at his belt beside a hand axe that stays faintly warm through its sheath, and he walks with the flat, unhurried, endlessly repeatable stride of a man who has measured his own pace against the width of a continent.