Gregor Grübbe

Gregor was born into a society of nomadic people calling themselves the Kolkar. Mostly humans, and the occasional travelers who could stay with them for as long as they contributed to the community. They were a people heavily reliant on horses in both hunting and travelling, and as a result of that extremely skilled with them as well. As their survival were based on what they could gather from the nature around them, they lived by a philosophy of protecting and preserving the nature and its wildlife while using what they must to survive.

              When Gregor was born it immediately came clear he wasn’t like the others of his people. Born tiny, even puny by some opinions, he was from the start limited in his opportunities within the Kolkar. Never growing big enough to ride a regular horse, and looked at as somewhat of a liability while hunting and gathering, he was quickly placed in service of the shaman Throll.

Throll were a half-orc who met the Kolkar long before the birth of Gregor, and stayed with them ever since. The Kolkar themselves not being proficient with any forms of magic found good use of the friendly shaman’s skills. He contributed with healing, enhancing spells and remedies and spiritual and elemental knowledge to better their understanding of the nature.

Since Gregor couldn’t ride a regular horse, he was granted a pony to ride when he started to serve Throll, to ease his tasks. His tasks were mostly simple, gathering specific ingredients, delivering what Throll made and helping in rituals. However, while helping Throll he also learned from him, and as the years went he understood more and more of the magic Throll wielded. He was far from able to recreate it as well as Throll , but he were the first from the Kolkars to wield magic. That slowly netted him more and more respect amongst his people, and even Throll seemed impressed.

One day Throll came to Gregor with a long list of ingredients he needed. He told Gregor he was preparing his biggest enhancement yet. It would increase his people’s strength and health beyond what they could imagine.

Gregor spent days gathering the ingredients while Throll prepared for the ritual. When Gregor delivered the last ingredients to Throll, Throll told him to go back to his tent and sleep while Throll finished the ritual through the night. Tomorrow the Kolkar would wake up to a new day and a new world, with strength and health they’d never seen before.

Gregor went to his tent and fell to sleep easily, although his excitement for the next day almost gave him shivers.

Suddenly, in the middle of the night, Gregor woke up. He could hear a loud, screeching, twisting sound, and his whole body felt weird. It felt like the whole world around him were twisting and turning around him. He managed to get on his feet and made his way out of the tent, filled with pain and nausea. When he got out in the moonlight he could see the world WAS twisting and turning. Everything was out of place, stretched, bent and turned. He could see objects hovering in the air in all shapes and sizes. When they collided, they would melt and merge together into something new. For some reason however, Gregor still were on the ground and able to move. He decided to get on his pony and get to Throll.

While riding towards Throll’s tent, the magnitude of what was happening started to appear to Gregor. He could see people floating in the air, hitting objects or each other, melting together either dying or creating monstrosities. He saw creations so horrific he’d never thought possible. Tents made of flesh, people with arms where the head should be, horses with three heads and human legs. Around every corner there were something new making him turn his head away in disgust and fear while riding onwards to Throll’s tent.

When he was getting close to Throll’s tent, he could see the tent glowing in a bright, green color, with shadows moving around on the walls of the tent. It looked like there had to be more people than just Throll inside the tent, counting from the shadows, but the shadows were also twisting and turning, impossible to tell exactly what made them.

As Gregor got closer to the tent, the pain and nausea increased, and he and his pony could barely move. When he was a couple of meters away from the tent, the screeching sound suddenly increased, accompanied by a loud bang. The green light from the tent turned bright white, and the last thing he felt was being thrown back several meters before everything went black.

When Gregor woke up it was the middle of the day. The sun was shining and Gregor was wet with swet. His body was aching with pain and he could barely move. He started to look around him, and it looked like a warzone. A weird, warped warzone, with everything blown away from the center were Throll’s tent used to be. Gregor was surrounded by dead monstrosities and unrecognizable objects.

With no signs of life around him, Gregor tried to stand up. He made several tries, falling over each time before starting to feel something were different than before. He looked down at his feet, and quickly recognized the reason to why he couldn’t stand up. His legs and feet had turned into a pony’s legs and hooves. And not only that, from the waist down he had a pony’s body, looking exactly like a small centaur. He also recognized the pony part of him looked exactly like his former pony.

After a while, Gregor figured out how to move around in his new form, although he felt disgusted by it. Moving around the camp, he found he was the only one left alive, and there were no traces of Throll. Not knowing what to do, he spent many days searching the camp for clues about what happened, but without luck. It was all a mystery to him. Did Throll do this on purpose, having hidden a malevolent and evil purpose for so long, or was it an accident? Why did he survive, and no one else? And why did he merge with his pony into a centaur?

While the days went by in the ruins of the camp, Gregor discover that his new shape weren’t the only new thing about him. The magic that had changed him had also given him new powers. He could wield magic like never before, controlling and using the elements, and shapeshift into different creatures. He spent weeks practicing his new skills, wandering around feeling a contact with the nature he’d never experienced before.

After some time, when Gregor felt at home with his new shape and skills, he decided to travel out in the world, to all the places he’d never seen before. He wanted to use his skills to stop whatever happened to his people from ever happening to anyone again. He wanted to stop any use of magic he deemed unnatural, magic that twisted and ruined life. And so, he went on to start his new life, leaving the wrecked land that used to be his people’s, now only a twisted scar of what it used to be.