He is the oldest human alive — not by magic, not by science, not by any mechanism he understands or has stopped trying to understand. He has lived through stone tools and iron swords, through plague and harvest, through fire and the long silence after.
He has had names in a hundred dead languages. He has loved people who became dust. He has built things that outlived him and things he outlived. When this world begins, he wakes with nothing. Again. Stone beneath his hands. Again.