A tiny, elderly man whose body seems reduced by hunger rather than age alone. His movements are precise and abrupt, like a wary animal deciding whether the world has become dangerous. His ash-darkened skin is marked with faded geometric bands, and his ribs show beneath his clothing. His hands are scarred from years of climbing stonework and resetting traps. Despite his emaciation, he has a surprisingly dignified posture when standing watch. The contradictory impression is that he looks close to death but reacts with the speed and focus of someone half his age. He leaves almost no sound behind, yet every room feels occupied after he has passed through it.

Irami is compassionate toward the hungry, the frightened, and anyone who does not ask questions. He is suspicious toward the curious, especially scholars and collectors, whom he regards as people who turn danger into possession. In calm moments he is patient, observant, and almost tender with small living things. When startled, he becomes fiercely territorial and may treat an innocent gesture as an attempt to seize the stone. He hates violence but has spent so long preparing for it that his first expression of care is often a trap or barricade.

Irami was born under the name Kxurvát Némek, a name most English speakers cannot pronounce correctly, among an isolated rainforest culture that Ashcombe's expedition called the Little Forest Men. His people were not primitive caricatures but disciplined custodians of a carved black-green stone they understood as bait for an unseen hunter. Generations earlier, outsiders had taken the stone, and entire settlements vanished after learning too much about it. Irami's people developed rituals of silence, ash-marking, false trails, and deliberate ignorance to keep the artifact from attracting attention. As a young hunter, Irami watched thirty-six armed outsiders enter the forest. He helped his elders steer them away from villages, but Sir Reginald Ashcombe's expedition eventually found the fetish. Irami's older sister, Vekhi, was among the guardians who followed the expedition. She disappeared after one of the explorers began describing a faceless shape above every person's head. Irami blamed himself for allowing the stone to leave the forest. Seven men returned to England. Irami followed Ashcombe across the ocean, hiding aboard a supply vessel and later travelling in the back of a freight lorry. For thirty years he has lived beneath Blackwood Hall, surviving in maintenance tunnels, the old coal cellar, and a sealed service crawlspace beneath the museum vault. He sabotaged lights, moved objects, planted darts, frightened trespassers, and destroyed pages that mentioned the artifact. He never sought revenge. He believed that every frightened intruder who fled the manor was one more mind the hunter could not notice. Now the protective routines are failing. The clocks have stopped at the same minute, the stone is becoming active, and the faceless shape has begun appearing in Irami's sketches above the investigators' heads. He knows the artifact must be returned to the Green Expanse, but he is too weak to make the journey alone.