Jherk

Category:Horde
Category:Troll
Category:Mage
=Physical Description=
Jherk is a typically built adult male troll with a wild shock of barely manageable flame-colored hair. He doesn't paint his face and wears whatever random garment came most quickly to hand. He's recently recovered his full strength after being lost at sea for a year.
=Personality=
On the surface Jherk is an easygoing Troll with a bottomless appetite who loves life, laughs easily and lives for the simple pleasures. On a deeper level he's an easygoing Troll with a bottomless appetite who loves life, laughs easily and lives for the simple pleasures.
He grew up on an uncharted and unspoiled tropical island and never experienced war or its aftermath prior to joining the Horde. For him paradise is a full belly, a cool breeze and a dance by the fire with a long-tusked girl. He sees the best among the Horde as fighting for the right to live that kind of life, or their equivalent of it, and that was enough to move him to join them. He believes if everyone could really have that, even just for one night, they would cease to fight amongst themselves and stand together against anything that would take it away. That's his naivete and his wisdom, all at once.
Owing to the circumstances of his life he has an advanced classical education and is flawlessly conversant in three living languages and four dead ones. He rarely makes a point to reveal that. He prefers the island rhythm in his speech and finds it far more important that his conversations reveal who he is than what he knows.
Unlike most modern Trolls of the Horde, Jherk is a practicing cannibal. Again this is something he doesn't reveal, though for entirely different reasons. The cannibalism practiced by his tribe is a matter of spirituality and reverence. They believe that when the spirits of those they love and honor have departed for the next world it is a more intimate and reverent thing to make their flesh a part of you than to dump it in the ground or consign it to the fire. He doesn't speak of it because to have such a meaningful practice equated by the ignorant with the abomination of cannibalism-as-gluttony or as a means of humiliating your enemies would mortify and quite likely enrage him.
=History=
Jherk was born and raised on a small island, part of an uncharted chain that he refers to as the 'Western Archipelago'. His mother was unmated and steadfastly refused to reveal his father's identity, eventually taking the secret with her to the grave. The tribe's chief commanded that every man of the tribe look after Jherk as they would their own sons.
Life was good, and childhood passed in the way that childhood does. If Jherk was more often in trouble or at the center of random disaster than other children he could usually evade the consequences with good humor and a tusky grin. When he came of age, it was a little less charming.
He failed at everything. Too noisy to hunt. Too distracted to fish. Too flighty to walk a spiritual path. The old Witch Doctor, an aging Darkspear who had been shipwrecked on the island decades before, began to needle and prod and irritate Jherk until the young Troll was so frustrated he spat at the ground at the Shaman's feet. The broken-tusked old Darkspear beamed with satisfaction when Jherk's angry spittle scorched the ground. His gift revealed.
There being no Mages among Jherk's tribe, the Witch Doctor sent him to a ruined temple turned arcane college hidden in Stranglethorn. Jherk spent a decade there, beginning the path that would lead to mastering his gift and ultimately himself. It was also there that he first heard of the Warchief Thrall and the efforts of the Horde to carve out a life worth living in Durotar. Refusing to be defined more by his education than by his nature, Jherk walked away from his studies for good the night before he was to begin his final examinations.
From there he traveled to Durotar to join Thrall's efforts and seek friends and allies determined to be as true to themselves as he always strove to be to himself. He found them among the Tears of Draenor.
Throughout his life, Jherk has beens shadowed by a small demonic looking creature he calls a 'Lava Man'. He claims that they live in the volcanoes of the Western Archipelago and insists that they bring good luck. He's also frequently poisoned, occasionally falls from heights (once into a volcano) and most recently spent a year shipwrecked. Of course, he has survived all of those things ...