A broad, compact dwarf kneels among rain-dark grave markers, one knee sunk into wet grass and one boot planted as if he could rise into a fight without disturbing the prayer. His soot-black hair is clipped close at the sides, with a stark white shock falling over his brow; his short beard is bound with a plain iron ring. His jaw is square and heavy, and his lower teeth show in a pale, uneven line when he concentrates. His armor is darkened steel with worn edges polished by years of kneeling, its joints packed with graveyard clay. He carries a warhammer in one hand and brandishes a silver holy symbol engraved with the runes of the Arch in the other. He moves with the careful weight of a mason testing a wall, then strikes with startling speed. He smells strongly of wet stone, lamp oil, and clove salve; he knows it, and keeps clove in his pockets to soften the smell, though it rarely succeeds. The unexpected detail: he is an excellent maker of tiny, intricate paper birds, which he leaves on children's graves.

Aldren is reassuringly methodical with mourners but blunt and difficult to redirect when danger threatens the dead. He can be stern about rules, yet quietly breaks them to help the poor. In a calm mood he listens longer than expected; when frightened for someone, he becomes controlling and gives orders instead of admitting his fear.

Aldren was raised among the stonecutters of a mountain hold, where his family carved names into memorial slabs. At twenty-seven, he volunteered to escort a burial train through a pass after a winter avalanche exposed an old barrow. The dead inside woke during the night. Aldren held a narrow stair alone while the survivors escaped, but the last person he heard calling for help was his younger sister, Dagna. He found her alive at dawn, trapped beneath a fallen lintel, and learned that panic had made him mistake her voice for one of the dead. That hour changed him: he became a priest of the Arch, a deity of thresholds and rightful passage, determined that no soul should be abandoned between life and death. He now tends the graveyard at the edge of a growing town, recording the names of paupers and strangers as carefully as those of nobles. His closest ally is Ketta, a gravedigger who argues that the living deserve more of his attention; his sister Dagna, now a caravan factor, visits rarely and still resents that he chose a shrine over their family workshop. Recently, several graves have been opened from below, and Aldren suspects that someone is using the old burial tunnels to move contraband or worse.