Garaw

== Appearance ==
Large even by Tauren standards, Garaw is roughly the size and shape of a heavy-duty forestry shredder. Life seems to have spent a great deal of time attempting to kill him - nerve damage from some past injury twists the right side of his face into a permanent leer, and interlocking scars from edged weapons spiderweb across his brow and snout. The rest of his body is marked by everything from axe-blows to felcannon shrapnel.
When campaigning, he usually wears the standard plate of the Horde's legionary heavy infantry. The leather harness he wears over his armor bristles with trench grenades, signal flares, and other tools of the trade.
His left palm bears a brand of the Orcish numeral 10, negated with a diagonal slash. This is a reference to decimation and is the mark of a former member of a Horde penal legion who has been redeemed through combat.
In times of stress or contemplation, he can be found chewing on a potent brand of goblin-made cigars that smell alarmingly like gunpowder.
== Personality ==
Years marching with the Horde taught Garaw to build walls between his thoughts and his actions, and he can be surprisingly patient at times. This has a dark side, however, as he has been known to suffer in silence for years before finally reaching his limit and lashing out. His speech and humor are full of the blunt, off-color terms you'd expect from someone who spent several years living in artillery craters.
He is somewhat proud of renouncing his simple tribal origins, and feels that learning industry and modern warfare is the only way the Shu'Halo will survive as a race. He sees the sword as a sophisticated weapon, requiring more training and skill than the clubs and spears he grew up with, and favors blades over any other arms.
== Youth ==
Garaw was born in the floodplains of Mulgore, to a small tribe known as the Riverdrinkers for their reliance on local streams for water and navigation. During a nighttime prank he and his older brother Moknicochu were playing as youths, he was kicked in the head by a kodo. Disfigured after his recovery and finding himself the target of several cruel nicknames, he adapted by becoming good enough with his fists that his tormentors kept their insults to themselves. The word "Garawjukh" means "strongest" in the dialect of the Riverdrinkers, and is often given to the largest male of a given generation. The Riverdrinker elders decided it was appropriate in his case.
Watching his brother grow into a shaman of some note and others of his generation follow druidic callings, Garaw never showed such talents and still feels the Earth-Mother does not speak to him. While at seasonal trading moots in Thunder Bluff, he ran across Orcish legionary recruiters on several occasions. Their technology and martial power convinced him that his destiny lay with the Horde.
== Service to the Horde ==
There has long been a tendency among the Horde's mostly Orcish commanders to place Tauren troops in roles of static defense and manual labor. The comparisons to beasts of burden are difficult to escape. Garaw was no exception, assigned to a heavy infantry century attached to the 16th Siege Cohort. The job of the Tauren unit was to defend catapults and ballistae from direct ground attack, as well as do the heavy lifting of ammunition and repair parts. He served with many of the tribemates he had grown up with.
The campaign to carve out a foothold in Hellfire Peninsula and found Thrallmar was long and grisly, but had the advantage of reinforcement and resupply directly through the Dark Portal. During this time, Garaw's mechanical talents were recognized, and he spent an increasing amount of time working directly with the 16th's siege equipment.
== Disgrace ==
After a few promotions and a brief stay in Orgrimmar for formal combat engineer training, Garaw was returned to Outland to fight in the Netherstorm theater. Tasked with holding the Horde's front while Kalimdor's population was tapped for reinforcements, the trench warfare against demonic forge camps was sanity-wrecking. After a disastrous ambush in an area reported as occupied by Horde infantry, Garaw saw most of his remaining kinsmen in the 16th die, and abruptly went out of his gourd. Tracking down the Centurion who had misreported his position, Garaw beat him to death with his own helmet. 
Garaw narrowly escaped execution when the gallows being built for him in Lower City were torn down by rioting citizens (He had done several favors for the refugees when his unit was garrisoned in Shattrath, and this service was not forgotten). He was branded with the mark of a legionary criminal, and spent the eight months in Netherstorm were spent in a penal legion, a disposable formation of criminals used for some of the most suicidal assaults of the campaign. Nobody was more surprised than he by his eventual survival.
== Mercenary Years ==
Released from his sentence and without a legionary pension, Garaw went into business for himself. Siegecraft was still a very marketable skill in Azeroth, and he provided expertise on sapping, demolitions, and siege weapons on a mercenary basis. He campaigned against the Amani trolls, spending most of his time arguing loudly with officials of the Silvermoon Armory and seeking permits for the obscene amounts of high explosive he shipped southward. Afterward, he contracted with a composite battery of mercenary artillery to fight in the uprising against the returned Kael'thas. His work in both campaigns was skillful, if not particularly distinguished. Protracted sieges and battles of attrition seldom allow for heroics.
== The Pridehoofs ==
After meeting Mahana Pridehoof at the Drunken Kodo in Ratchet (shortly after the campaign in Quel'Danas), Garaw pursued a relationship with her that could be best described as 'difficult'. Arguments, similarly stubborn personalities, and the complex misadventures of Mahana's sister Sihu Pridehoof revealed that a courtship was simply not meant to be. All told, the only reason the pair did not wind up smacking each other in the mouth in spectacular fashion was probably Pakwa and Wuyi - Mahana's nieces and adopted children. The presence of two adorable yet cantankerous children left little time for bitterness to develop.
== Failed Marriage ==
Garaw was briefly 'engaged', in accordance with Riverdrinker marriage rituals, to Idelle Paleflower of the Cenarion Circle. Riverdrinker custom requires that a couple to be married builds and shares a home together. If, at the end of a year, they still live under the same roof, they are married.
Despite living together in Nagrand for many months, the two were never married. Garaw speaks little of the matter to this very day, and grows sullen and irritable at its mention. Probably not a good idea to ask.
== Northrend Campaign, Death at Wrathgate, and Return ==
The sheer scale of the war against the Lich King led to Garaw being reinstated into the Horde legions at his previous rank, despite his criminal past and near-execution. The mass casualties suffered by the officer corps at the hands of the scourge ensured that he was promoted steadily. His century was charged with scouting routes between the two major beachheads on Northrend's southern shore. During this time, his unit was recalled from their exploration of mountain passes in the Dragonblight, and attached as reinforcements at the battle of Wrathgate.
Garaw was among the fallen when Putress unveiled his grand betrayal. Suffocated by poison gas, he and hundreds of other Horde soldiers were hastily interred in icy mass graves. His body and animus were recovered by his brother Moknicochu. The former was buried at Red Rocks in Mulgore, the latter became fused with the shaman's own personality.
After remaining dead and gone for exactly one year, Garaw returned under mysterious circumstances. Awakening to find his brother's spirit no longer inhabiting his body, Moknicochu journeyed to the Red Rocks to find Garaw alive and whole again, wandering the ancestral gravesite in a profound state of despair and confusion. Exactly what agency was the cause of his resurrection is unknown to this day.
== The Advanced Mechanotech War Council ==
After convalescing from death and reporting for return to duty with the Horde, Garaw was selected to join the cadre of the Advanced Mechanotech War Council, a consortium of Orcish military leaders and goblin scientists focused on the development of combat technology. The face of war had changed drastically during the battle in Icecrown, with flying war machines and armored siege tanks becoming a common sight. The Council was organized to guide the construction of new and better battle machines.
As one of the lowest-ranking members of the Council and a foot soldier at heart, the Riverdrinker was assigned to the newly formed IVth Orgrimmar Airborne Legion and charged with field testing new parachute rigging and infantry weapons issued to the experimental unit. His most intensive fighting was during the last assault to take Ymirheim, a large-scale airborne effort that took months and bogged down into costly hand to hand fighting with the physically superior Vrykul.
== Now ==
After the fall of Arthas, Garaw still serves in the Horde forces at the rank of Centurion. His current assignment is with an engineering detachment, rebuilding the hundreds of bridges burnt to ash in Northrend and painstakingly dismantling the minefields that blanket snowdrifts in the Storm Peaks. He awaits news of his career's ultimate fate in a rapidly downscaling army.
Category:Horde
Category:Tauren
Category:Warrior
Category:Blacksmith (H)
Category:Engineer (H)