Turalai looks as if the forest has been slowly pressing its thumb into him. His skin is a warm brown dulled by years of damp soil, with pale, powdery seams of grave lime settled into the creases of his knuckles. His shoulders roll forward from digging, but he walks with a careful, almost ceremonial placement of each boot, as though the ground might be listening. He smells faintly of wet roots, lamp oil, and crushed mint. Unexpectedly for a gravedigger, he keeps a tiny brass wind-up bird tucked in his breast pocket and winds it before difficult conversations.

Turalai is tender with mourners but unsentimental about danger; he can joke over a shovel and then refuse to let anyone enter a fresh grave. He wants people near him, yet retreats into work whenever affection makes him feel exposed. In calm moments he is patient and gently curious. Under pressure he becomes blunt, protective, and willing to take a risk he would forbid anyone else.

Turalai was raised among traveling aasimar healers, but settled in the forest village of Vetch after falling in love with Dov, a local charcoal burner. When a fever took their infant daughter, Turalai dug her grave himself. That night, the child knocked three times from beneath the earth. He opened the grave and found only a warm patch of soil, but heard the knocking continue beneath the neighboring plots. Since then, the dead of Vetch have begun to stir whenever the moon disappears behind the cursed canopy. Turalai became the village gravedigger and a Grave Domain cleric, learning to distinguish restless dead from frightened living. He and Dov now live apart: Dov blames him for keeping the cemetery open, while Turalai believes sealing it would trap the dead under the curse. His young assistant Joz has recently found a fresh set of footprints leading out of a grave that has not yet been dug.