Serehusk

Serehusks are the result of old farm rituals gone awry: desperate hedge-witches or exhausted field-priests who bound a spare portion of will into a harvest gourd to guard a homestead through winter. Left unchecked, that borrowed will can twist the gourd into sentience. They are most common on the margins between fertile fields and unmown scrub — ruined barns, hedgerows, and the soggy edges of willow ponds. Farmers tell of Serehusks that keep watch over family plots for years, proud and territorial, and of ones that learned mischief and wandered into villages to steal bread. Scholars at the Order of Wilted Lantern keep journals of Serehusk behavior; the Order's field notebooks (compiled by Merris Halloway) note that mature Serehusks often collect objects — buttons, bits of ribbon, a child's toy — into a hollow beside their roots and fiercely defend this 'larder'. The Bog of Krelm is rumored to hold a grove of enormous Serehusks that act like a distributed mind, exchanging messages through root and slime. Hunters who venture near such groves risk not only entrapment but being watched and remembered: a Serehusk's grudges can last for seasons.

A Serehusk is roughly the size and silhouette of a rotund, slightly squat human torso — 2.5 to 3 feet tall and about as broad. Its pumpkin rind is thick and pocked, mottled orange with bruises of deep green; seams of fibrous vine run like healed scars, sometimes knotted where smaller tendrils sprout. The 'face' is a shallow carving in the rind: a rimmed mouth that can close to muffle sounds and two hollowed eye-sockets that glow with faint amber bioluminescence at night. From the crown grow dozens of vines and cord-like roots that end in grasping, three-fingered tendrils; some vines are smooth and green, others are thorned and woody. The underside has a broad central root-pad that drags along the ground and leaves a trail of crushed leaves and faint phosphorescent spores. Small sockets in the rind sometimes hold found objects — a coin, a shard of glass — as trophies.