Durok Deepseeker
The Coldpeak’s shaman, and a large part of the reason the tribe still eats. A healer and a reader of the land who has spent years listening to what the mountain has to say and acting on what he hears.
His spring is the thing to understand. In the middle of a winter that has not ended in years, he made a warm place. Green things grow there. The water runs. He did that — not through prayer or luck, but through understanding the land at a depth most people never reach, and refusing to accept that Auril’s cold is the final word on the matter. His cold-resistant crops are what carry the Coldpeak through when the hunts fail. That is his answer to the endless winter, and it has been enough to make him indispensable.
He is not easy to be near. He is guarded with outsiders, slower to trust than most of the tribe, and he does not trouble to hide it. There is something watchful in him the party has not yet taken the measure of — whether it is caution, old prejudice, or something they haven’t seen the shape of, he has not given them enough to say.
Before the Reweave — In the never-was, Durok’s listening had curdled into obsession. His journal told of a staff that knew the land the way he had spent his life trying to, and of Netherese geomancers who had bent the earth to their will — power he meant to take for himself and turn against the cold across the whole Dale. He bonded and named creatures to that purpose; Rimetalon was his. Then his runestones went dark, his last entry ended mid-thought, and he was gone. The Reweave rewove that thread: in this reality he never touched Netherese magic, never bonded a creature, and never vanished. Memories of the darker Durok surface as half-rumor, not error.