Aldren is said to be older than the world, older than the Veyndra, older than any way of counting age. He is not numbered among the gods, because he existed before godhood meant anything, and he has never asked anyone to worship him.
The first dust
The few who have heard him speak of it say he woke where there was no light, no sound, no distance, and no second thing by which to know himself. After a solitude without measure, a single grain of dust touched his hand. He began to gather. He pressed dust to dust and shaped small forms simply because shape was new. When the Veyndra woke, his patient gathering gave them something to begin with. He did not rule them. He watched, asked the occasional question, and kept making small things while they made vast ones.
He dislikes being called a creator. "I found what was already willing to be touched," is all he offers.
Three settlings
Aldren's oldest form is not human: a shape of dust from before matter had rules, roughly person-like but built to an older geometry, its two sides not quite alike, because symmetry was not yet a law. As he grows aware of living things nearby, it closes into the threshold form, broad planes of pressed clay, ash and mineral, a face gently pressed into the material, and eyes that open onto the first dark, with a few fixed lights in them that are memories of the earliest stars.
Most people only meet his hearth form. Everyone present sees the same shape: a weathered man in one valley, a broad-handed woman or an elder of another people elsewhere. Something always betrays the older being beneath. His eyes stay almost black, pale seams branch across his hands, and his shadow leans the wrong way.
In Myrvand
He came here while its seas were still warm from their making, and has stayed under countless names: gardener, ferryman, grave-digger, beekeeper, road-mender, quiet guest. In this age he is tied in tales to an old walled garden at the edge of a young forest, with a low cottage, beehives, and one room full of seeds, mended tools and small objects whose makers have no names left. He calls it "the place I am keeping for now".
Animals grow calm around him but do not obey. Seeds sprout in soil he has held. He holds immense power and almost never uses it. He will spend decades healing a poisoned marsh and refuse to topple an empire in an afternoon, and his restraint looks like wisdom, cowardice or cruelty depending on who is suffering.
He is not all-knowing. Some futures were hidden even from him. Some fragments place a nameless figure at the rim of the Gap during the War of the First Dawn, kneeling, gathering what fell. Whether he fought, watched, or let it happen, he has never said.