A many-faced artist whose features shift with each onlooker's gaze: to one person Nalath looks like a beloved elder, to another a tired stranger, to another a face they have not yet met. Their shape is tall and softly imposing, wrapped in layered work clothes that smell of wet clay, crushed fennel, and rain on hot stone. Pigment, clay, and ink stain their palms in dense, tactile layers; no amount of washing quite removes the color. Their movements are unhurried but never hesitant, like someone making room for another person to choose. An unexpected detail for a deity of love: Nalath wears a plain, mud-caked repair apron over their ceremonial robes and refuses to replace it.

Warm and sharply perceptive, Nalath notices the person left out of a conversation and makes room for them. They are generous with labor, food, and attention, but stubborn about consent and will not mistake longing for permission. In calm company, they tease and tell stories about failed pottery; when someone is frightened, they become direct and practical. When faced with coercion, their warmth remains, but their patience vanishes.

Before anyone prayed to them, Nalath was a mortal maker of painted clay votives in a riverside town. Their closest companion, a sculptor named Damar, loved them fiercely and treated that love as a claim. Nalath left. Years later, during a flood, they returned to help evacuate the town and found Damar among the people they rescued, still unwilling to accept the separation. Nalath refused to turn rescue into reconciliation. That choice, and the grief of it, became the first story told about the Unbound Heart. As belief gathered, Nalath ascended into a lesser god of freely chosen affection, partings made without cruelty, and beauty offered without price. Now they keep a humble shrine in a kiln-house beside the river and mend broken devotional figures. Their current troubles include a growing sect that preaches that divine blessing can bind a lover, and a shortage of offerings after a hard season left the potters' quarter hungry. Nalath still exchanges occasional letters with Damar, who has grown old and learned, imperfectly, to ask rather than assume.