Horkina's Backstory

I grew up a large village called Klavdiya under some mountains. My father was a dwarf who ran a tavern in called the Stumbling Monk. He was a lifelong bachelor entering into late middle-age when my mother came to town. She was a young adventurer, far from home for the first time. They immediately hit it off. They married quickly and I came soon afterwards. After raising me for a few years, the desire to continue adventuring took hold of my mother and she started going on short quests outside of our village. My father loved her and wanted her to stay home, but he knew her nature and never tried to stop her from going on these journeys. One of these journeys ended badly and my mother ended up dying from a dose of poison.
My father was heartbroken by my mother’s death. He could see in me the same wanderlust and swore that I would not meet the same fate. As a child I did not know exactly what he meant by that, but I did notice that after my mother’s demise the things I ate had a certain twang to them. Sometimes the stews I ate for dinner had strange purple mushrooms in them. Or my morning gruel contained tiny red flecks that burned my throat as I swallowed. I later came to realize that he was feeding me low levels of poison to build my resistance to it.
So I grew up in the Stumbling Monk. When I was old enough I started serving drinks. I learned many things in that tavern. I learned good balance from carrying many pints of ale through crowds of drunken dwarves, how to start a good old fashioned barfight, drinking songs from across the continent, and jokes so bawdy they make even the most seasoned of barflies blush.
My father eventually passed away. I tried to take over the bar on my own, but it was not the same without him. I sold the Stumbling Monk and used the profits to fund a trip touring the taverns and inns of the countryside. I spent many months on this trip and saw the bottom of many glasses. As a side benefit, I also had many barroom brawls and some more serious scuffles in the alleys outside of these bars.
I ended up in Cauldron while trying to visit all the taverns in the well-known “Monkey Chain”. I had already been to the “Tippling Monkey”, the “Monkey See, Monkey Drink”, and the “Brass Monkey”. The last two on the list were the “Lucky Monkey” and the “Happy Monkey” outside of Cauldron.