Groflek the Gardener's page

About Groflek the Gardener

The unhappy product of a human woman's rape at the hands of a roving band of orcs, Groflek's birth was his mother's death. When it became apparent that his biological father was an orc, the elder-cum-healer of his village, apparently a white witch, cursed Groflek as a murderer and cursed his father for allowing him to live.

Nevertheless, his father raised him as his own, fleeing by night across the border to the Land of the Linnorm Kings. For the first few years of his life, Groflek was raised by Patrek in caves in the foothills of the Stormspears. Before many years, even hardy Patrek couldn't eke out a living, so father and son headed for Kalsgard; if they had to be around others, they would be less noticeable, not least by the white witches, in a larger settlement.

Already, though, Groflek's affinity for nature was showing. While he would hunt with his father, he also tended plants. At first, these were little more than for flavouring, but soon became foodstuffs and then medicines. While he father went back to being a butcher when they settled in Kalsgard, Groflek started growing his garden again. At first, the fruits of his labour were just sold in his father's shop but they soon attracted the attention of some who bought food for no less a figure than Sveinn Blood-Eagle's castellan. Before long, he was running the kitchen-garden for the lord of Kalsgard.

There, he acquired a reputation for his green fingers – no pun intended – and for standing up for the servants and small-folk he would come across, challenging people above him to justify their actions when he felt a wrong had been done them. His position and skills did much to save him criticism; his physique did the rest. The elderly human in charge of the kitchen-garden took him under his wing as a result, and the two began to spend more and more time together, the one learning from the other.

His wild upbringing still sent him ranging into the wintry wilds of the Lands of the Linnorm Kings, in search of peace and solitude as much as for more plants for his garden. On a recent range, he found a polar bear cub, abandoned or orphaned, and brought it back with him to Kalsgard. While hardly the first time he'd brought back a runt or stray, there is still trepidation about having so dangerous an animal wandering a city.

While many things are unusual about a six-and-a-half foot half-orc with unmistakeably green skin who seems to have unlimited gentleness and devotion for the flora and fauna under his care, he considers the rings set into the tusks that jut from his lower jaw as his trademark.