A broad-shouldered half-orc with gray-green skin, a broken lower tusk, and a jagged scar across the left eyebrow. Their black hair is cropped close except for a stubborn braided lock behind one ear, threaded with bits of copper wire. They wear battered chain mail beneath a soot-stained miner's coat and carry a round iron shield marked with old quarry scratches. Their hands are thick, callused, and unusually nimble when carving small figures from scraps of wood.

I watch people the way a miner watches a cracked ceiling. I am blunt, practical, and slow to trust, but I notice who is hungry, who is frightened, and who is pretending not to be.

Krznik was found wrapped in a torn grain sack beside a dwarf quarry road, still young enough to fit inside a tool chest. The miners who discovered the baby argued over what to do, then grudgingly took turns raising him. He learned Dwarvish before he learned Common, slept in a bunkhouse among snoring stonecutters, and spent his childhood making tiny wooden miners, goats, and rope-bound figures from discarded scraps. The other children mocked his tusks, his height, and the fact that no one knew where he came from. Krznik answered some insults with his fists, others by quietly stealing the offenders' boots and hiding them in ventilation shafts. At sixteen, after a beating that left two of his tusks chipped, he ran away and joined a loose criminal crew working the borderlands. Their enterprises began with smuggling ore and tools, then expanded into illegal mining, animal trafficking, and the destruction of farms and buildings that stood in the way of profitable routes. Krznik became their enforcer and tunnel specialist, learning to fight in cramped passages and to read structural weaknesses in old stone. He finally abandoned the crew after they killed a pack animal he had secretly freed and burned a farm whose family had once given him food. Now he sells his skills as a fighter, scout, and caravan guard, trusting no employer completely and carving figurines whenever he needs to decide whether someone deserves his loyalty.