Ghorza is a broad-shouldered orc woman with weathered green-gray skin, a flattened nose, one chipped lower tusk, and thick black hair worn in a practical braid tied with strips of old red cloth. Her left eye is clouded silver, a lasting mark from the bargain that changed her. She wears patched traveling clothes beneath a dark leather coat, with a stitched blue thread wrapped around her wrist as a reminder of the person she failed to save. Her spellbook is a bundle of loose pages sewn into a child's old blanket.

Ghorza is patient, warm, and unexpectedly domestic. She remembers who takes honey in their tea, repairs torn sleeves without being asked, and sleeps closest to the door so others can rest. She is also distractible and painfully literal, often treating metaphors as possible warnings from her patron. She dislikes being praised and becomes flustered when people call her brave.

Ghorza was once the strongest hand in a poor border settlement, but strength did little for the people she loved. When a wasting sickness took hold of her younger sister, Ghorza found a stranger waiting beneath the old hill shrine. The thing offered a cure in exchange for a promise, one Ghorza accepted without asking what the promise would cost. Her sister lived, but the settlement's well ran black for one night, and several villagers woke speaking in voices that were not their own. Ghorza has never learned whether the bargain saved one life or merely moved the suffering elsewhere. Years later, Ghorza still hears the patron's thoughts in the gaps between ordinary sounds. She became a warlock because the power was already inside her life, and because refusing to use it seemed less honest than learning how to control it. She travels from village to village, tending the sick, defending runaways, and taking food from cruel collectors when necessary. Her pact is written in a child's blanket because the first pages were sewn there by her sister. Ghorza believes every life she protects is a small payment toward a debt that can never truly be paid.