Hob Thistledown is a lanky firbolg whose lichen-grey fur lies in soft, uneven swirls, darker where rain and soil have matted it along his forearms. Pine needles catch in his coarse hair, and a few have lodged there so long they seem deliberately placed. He moves with a gardener's patient economy, turning his broad shoulders sideways through doorways and stepping around seedlings no one else has noticed. His eyes travel first to the floor, checking where feet have trodden, then to the nearest living thing. An unexpected detail: he carries a tiny, carefully folded paper map of the stars, marked in a precise hand, and consults it when planting by moonlight.

Hob is gentle with living things and blunt with people who endanger them. In calm company he is wry, patient, and quietly curious; under pressure he becomes methodical to the point of seeming cold. He longs for community but resists relying on anyone, and his practical kindness often arrives before he can find the words for affection.

Hob was raised among the fern terraces of a remote firbolg settlement, where tending a shared orchard was treated as a promise to people not yet born. As a young adult, he left to restore neglected gardens around the market town of Sedgewake. There he became caretaker of the old public garden and grew close to its practical, sharp-tongued keeper, Thessa Vuk, who taught him to graft fruit trees and argue with town officials. Years ago, a fever blight reached the garden. Hob had to burn a beloved row of pear trees to stop it spreading, but the fire also destroyed the nesting site of a rare moth he had promised to protect. That loss made him cautious about easy remedies and reluctant to make promises he cannot keep. Now a developer is diverting the spring that feeds the garden, while a creeping black rot has appeared in its oldest apple tree. Hob is trying to find the source without alarming the town or losing the last of the garden.