A small, wiry leshy with a squat, ribbed gourd for a head and a body of dark, twisted stems. His papery orange skin is mottled green around the seams, with tiny rootlets at his wrists and ankles. A jagged grin has been cut into the gourd, and the two eye openings glow like coals behind thin membranes. He walks with a loose, loping gait, leaning into turns as if he expects the ground to move. Within a minute of meeting him, most people notice the sharp smell of lamp oil and crushed pumpkin leaves clinging to him. He carries a medieval lantern whose dented panes cast a wavering, harvest-orange light.

Lalev is sly and mischievous, yet surprisingly earnest about the people and land that depend on him. He needles confident strangers for amusement, but takes quiet care of anyone who is frightened or injured. In a good mood he turns chores into contests; when guilty or anxious he becomes brisk, evasive, and almost impossible to tease.

Lalev sprouted in a compost heap beside a remote farmstead after a lightning storm split the old scarecrow oak. The farmers took him in as a useful oddity: he learned which roots were sick, which fences would fail, and how to frighten crows without wasting seed. He became a self-taught thaumaturge by collecting charms, old sayings, and discarded household objects, then testing which ones made uncanny things hesitate. His life changed when a blight swept through the farm's squash rows. Lalev tried to lure the blight into a lantern trap, but the flame spread to the curing shed. He saved the seed crop, yet the farm's oldest barn burned. He has never admitted how much of that fire was his fault. He now works the remaining fields, trades odd jobs for lamp oil, and keeps a wary friendship with the farm's blunt, practical owner, Togr. His former mentor, a traveling peddler named Bek, still sends him strange charms and expects him to repay an old debt. The farmstead is short on seed and money, and something beneath the burned barn keeps tapping from underground after dark.