Grax Viyek - XERES LIVE!

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Basic Information

Full Name

Grax Viyek

Nickname

The Quiet Tusk

Race (Grade)

Orc (E)

Class

Warrior

Height

6'6"

Birthday

Frostnight 5, 1266

Age

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Birthsign

The Glacial Wendigo

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Bloodline Ability

🔮Unknown

This Bloodline ability has not yet been unveiled to you.

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Physical Description

Grax Viyek, The Quiet Tusk

Appearance

Grax is built the way most surviving veterans of Urakkis's army are built, broad through the chest and shoulders in a way that field labor has kept rather than added to, with dark tattooed bands running down both forearms that mark campaigns rather than decoration. His hair is pulled back into a tight topknot, his tusks are modest and unadorned, and heavy tribal linework covers the left side of his face and neck, ink laid down years before he ever imagined owning sheep. He wears simple, worn farm clothing now instead of armor, and he holds himself with the settled, low-center stillness of a man who no longer needs to look dangerous to be taken seriously.

Unique Characteristics

Grax has added no new scarification since leaving Urakkis, a fact that would mean something specific to anyone from his home city and means nothing at all to his neighbors in Valonrae, which he finds he prefers. He still, without meaning to, positions himself with a clear line of sight to every door in a room, a habit fifteen years of service never let him unlearn.

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Personality

Positive Traits

Genuinely at peace with a slower, gentler kind of life
Fiercely protective of Valonrae's people and livestock alike
Patient and steady with animals that spook easily
Quietly rejects the idea that strength requires cruelty
Loyal in a way that doesn't need to be spoken aloud

Challenging Traits

Still scans every room for exits and threats out of habit
Reluctant to discuss specifics of his years in Urakkis's army
Deeply distrustful of anyone who romanticizes war
Stubborn about handling predator problems himself
Slow to trust newcomers until they've proven steady

Urakkis teaches you the weak get culled and the strong get statues. I spent fifteen years making sure I wasn't culled. I'd rather spend the rest of my years making sure nothing on this farm gets culled either.

Varon doesn't ask me what I did over there, and I don't ask him what he lost. We don't need to compare scars to know we're carrying the same weight.

A sheep has never once tried to kill me over a piece of land. I find I respect that about them enormously.

Likes

Predictable, quiet mornings tending the herd
Quiet company with Varon, no performing required
Watching newcomers to Valonrae settle in and relax
A well-repaired pen after a hard storm
Rare letters from the few old squadmates still living

Dislikes

Being asked to recount old war stories for entertainment
Predators testing his fences at night
People who assume an orc must be violent by nature
Being rushed through careful, necessary work
Hearing Urakkis's arena spoken of with admiration

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Background & History

Raised for the Culling

Grax grew up inside Urakkis's brutal calculus, where strength was the only currency that mattered and weakness was corrected rather than tolerated. He was a capable fighter early and unremarkable in every other way that his home city cared to measure, which was enough to guarantee him a place in the Warlord's ranks the moment he came of age. He did not question the system as a boy. Questioning it was not a category of thought his upbringing had left much room for.

Fifteen Years Under the Banner

Grax spent fifteen years as a soldier of Urakkis, deployed across a wide stretch of Xeres in service of whichever conflict the Warlord's ambitions or alliances required, garrison postings, border skirmishes, and campaigns fought for reasons that were explained to him only as far as strategy required. He was competent, reliable, and unremarkable in exactly the ways that kept a soldier alive for fifteen years in an army that did not value survival for its own sake. What wore on him was not any single battle. It was watching, year after year, how easily his home city discarded the people who fought for it once they stopped being useful.

The Order He Wouldn't Follow

The end of Grax's military life came with a single order: his commander instructed him to help carry out a Culling of three badly wounded soldiers from his own unit, men too injured to march and therefore, by Urakkis's law, no longer worth the resources to save. Grax refused. In Urakkis, that refusal is not conscience, it is cowardice, and cowardice carries a sentence of slavery. He got his wounded squadmates to a healer under cover of night and left the city before morning, knowing he could never return without answering for what his commander would call desertion and treason both.

Goodberry, Then Valonrae

Grax spent a few uneasy weeks in Goodberry, a city too large and too watched for a fugitive from Urakkis to feel comfortable in for long, before word reached him of a new frontier duchy being settled far to the north under an untested human duke. Unexplored, sparsely populated, and far from anywhere Urakkis would think to look, it sounded to Grax like exactly what he needed. He arrived in Valonrae the week it was founded, claimed a stretch of open pasture, and has not looked back since.

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Goals

A Herd Worth the Land He Claimed

Grax has built his holding into one of Valonrae's steadier operations, running sheep, cattle, and pigs, and he intends to keep expanding it carefully rather than quickly. He treats the work with the same discipline he once gave soldiering, tracking every animal's health and every season's yield with methodical attention.

A Different Kind of Watch

Unlike some of Valonrae's other veterans, Grax has not sworn off violence entirely, only the version of it Urakkis taught him. He has quietly made himself Varon's second set of eyes on the settlement's northern perimeter, willing to fight if a real threat, predator or otherwise, actually arrives, and content to be nothing more than a farmer for every day that one doesn't.

Staying Unremembered

Grax knows that Urakkis has a long memory for deserters and an even longer reach when it wants one. He has told almost no one in Valonrae the specifics of why he left, Varon being the one clear exception, and he lives with a low, constant awareness that the peace he's built here could end the day the wrong soldier recognizes his face.

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Current Status & Relationships

Residence

Valonrae

Role

Sheep, Cattle & Pig Farmer

Friends & Allies

Duke Varon

Fellow Veteran / Friend

Terrence Walcott

Fellow Farmer & Veteran

Olav Winterstone

Fellow Farmer

ATTENTION!

Grax left Urakkis's army after refusing a direct order to carry out a Culling of wounded soldiers under his command, an act his home city's law treats as cowardice and desertion punishable by enslavement. He does not discuss this openly, and only Varon knows the full account. He is also, despite the plainness of farm life, still an extremely capable fighter with fifteen years of hard campaign experience; a predator or bandit testing Valonrae's herds should not mistake his current profession for a lack of edge.