Jori is a small, gourd-bodied leshy with a squat, pear-shaped torso, ridged like a pumpkin that dried in the sun. His rind is matte orange, mottled with green bruising and fine pale scars where old vines once anchored. His carved face has a jagged crescent grin and two deep, empty eye sockets; there are no eyeballs behind them. A wiry stem curls from his crown like a question mark. He perches sideways on fence rails, balancing with a root-tail and swinging his legs as if the drop below were a joke. His lantern makes the hollows of his face seem bottomless. The unexpected detail: he keeps a tiny, meticulously folded paper map tucked beneath his rind, and studies it with the solemnity of a surveyor.

Jori loves the instant of surprise and pretends he is indifferent to whether people like him. Around children he is theatrical and teasing, but the moment someone is truly hurt his humor vanishes and he becomes briskly protective. With adults he starts wary and clever, then grows earnest if they show patience. He wants to be taken seriously as a guardian, yet cannot resist staging an entrance.

Jori sprouted in a field at Brindle Row, a farmstead whose old name came from the long-vanished ditch crew that once worked there. He was grown from a discarded lantern-gourd after a late frost ruined the crop. At first the children treated him as a scarecrow, until he learned to make the lantern's shadow grin and began ambushing them from fence posts. His pranks became a seasonal ritual, and he grew fond of the children he frightened. During a spring flood, he saw a child named Nessa swept toward the millrace and leapt down to distract her with a monstrous shadow until her older brother could pull her clear. The near-drowning changed his idea of what a scare was for: fear could warn, not only amuse. Now he maps culverts and weak fences, quietly trying to keep the farm children safe. He is close to Nessa, now a practical young apprentice, but she wants him to stop frightening her little cousins. The farm's new steward, Dast Kvel, plans to drain the marshy patch where Jori's seed-vine still grows, and Jori has not found the courage to tell him why that patch matters.