A compact lightfoot halfling man with weather-browned skin, an uneven fringe of dark curls, and large hazel eyes that seem perpetually distracted by distant birdcalls. His patched green-gray cloak is stitched with seed packets, feathers, and scraps of shed animal fur. He carries a crooked walking staff, a round wooden shield painted with a spiral of mushrooms, and a small brass bell tied to one boot. His hands are usually stained with soil, crushed leaves, or berry juice.

Paskel is gentle, intensely observant, and almost impossible to hurry. He is awkward around civilized conversation but completely at ease with frightened animals, poisonous fungi, and unsettling things found under roots. He often says something profound immediately after saying something socially disastrous.

Paskel Zorri grew up at the edge of a halfling village where the orchards ended and the old forest began. He was never good at village work. He dropped baskets, tangled fishing line around his own ankles, and once apologized to a scarecrow for frightening it. Animals, however, treated him differently. A nervous mare let him braid her mane during a thunderstorm, foxes followed him home, and a dying owl showed him a hollow tree where the forest's oldest roots drank from an underground spring. When loggers began cutting paths toward that spring, Paskel left the village and became a hermit beneath the trees. An aging druid named Otxa Vell taught him Druidic, the names of medicinal plants, and the patient art of listening without expecting an answer. Paskel eventually learned that the forest was not asking for a champion. It was asking for someone strange enough to notice what everyone else ignored. Now he travels its borders, protecting nesting grounds, guiding lost creatures, sabotaging illegal traps, and attempting diplomacy with people who are often more frightened of him than of the things he protects.