ㅤ❝ㅤ i want to be myself again. i want to be six. i want to stop knowing everything i know. ㅤ❞ㅤ

I. The Golden HeirDorian was born to ㅤHouse Ashgroveㅤ, an old family of Ul'dahn thaumaturges, and for twenty-odd summers he had no reason to think his luck was anything out of the ordinary. His father taught him his first fire spell in the garden and laughed when it caught his own sleeve. His mother sat up with him through every childhood fever, singing the same Thanalan lullaby until her voice went hoarse. Neither of them ever pushed. They kept his letters in a cedar box and told him, more often than he thought necessary, that he could be anything he liked.He grew up handsome and clever and well aware of both. He liked good coats and better company, could talk his way into most of the salons in the Jewel of the Desert, and had a habit of paying for everyone's wine whether they wanted him to or not. His tutors thought he was gifted. Half of them also thought he was spoiled, and he would have cheerfully agreed with them over a bottle he was paying for.When the Ashgroves took in a thin, silent boy from the city's lower quarters, the household treated him like a guest who had overstayed his welcome. Dorian decided he was his brother. He split his lessons with Viktor, slipped him supper on the nights the boy was sent to bed without, and taught him to read by candlelight out of the family grimoires. Dorian thought nothing of it. It's possible Viktor has thought of little else since.II. The OfferingThe love was real enough to do its job. That was the trouble.His parents belonged to ㅤa heretical sectㅤ tucked inside the worship of Nald'thal, one that had taken Ul'dah's two oldest devotions, coin and the dead, and married them. Thal weighs every soul that passes. The sect believed his scales could be bargained with: give the god a soul heavy enough, and he repays the family in fortune now and favor later.Weight, by their reckoning, came from what a soul carried. Grief and want made it light. A full, proud, well-loved life made it heavy. A son adored for twenty years and killed at his best was worth more to them than anything the house had ever owned.So they adored him. Every lesson in the garden and every song at his bedside had been husbandry, and the cedar box of letters was closer to a ledger. Even Viktor had been acquired for the purpose, a companion for the offering so it wouldn't grow lonely and lose its weight.On the night Dorian was named heir, half of Ul'dah's minor nobility drank to him. His father's toast made grown merchants cry. His mother held his face and told him he had made their lives worth living. Near midnight they took him down to the family crypt for what they called an old Ashgrove custom, and he followed without a second thought.He understood when the door shut behind him and his mother didn't stop smiling.The east wing burned that night. The Brass Blades called it an accident, the casket stayed closed, and by the following month House Ashgrove's debts had quietly disappeared.III. The Brother Who Would Not Let GoViktor didn't believe the fire. The grief was too composed, and the funeral ran like a well-rehearsed dinner party. He went through the house at night until he found the ledgers: payments to the sect, records of offerings from other old families going back further than he wanted to count, and, under Dorian's name in Isolde's neat hand, a line about himself. ㅤUnsuitable. Insufficient weight.ㅤThe trail led to the sect's ossuary beneath the city, where the bodies of the offerings were taken apart and kept while their souls waited at Thal's threshold. He was too late to save his brother. ㅤHe was not too late to steal him back.ㅤ(how exactly he revived dorian, remains unknown. still waiting on viktor mun's explanation).What he couldn't recover of Dorian, he made up with what the ossuary had on its shelves: pieces of earlier offerings, other houses' beloved children. Then he went home and killed the last two Ashgroves.IV. The WakingDorian woke on a stone table in the dark in a body that didn't feel... right.The last thing he remembered was his mother's face as the door closed. The first thing he saw was Viktor in a chair beside him, sleeves dark to the elbow with blood that wasn't his own, so relieved he was close to laughing."They're gone," his brother told him. "They'll never touch you again. You're free!"He said it the way a child hands over a drawing.The first time Dorian caught his reflection, he screamed until the borrowed throat gave out. The jaw wasn't his. There were seams around his eyes, and wherever the stitches ran, the skin on either side was a different shade, as if it had been cut from different people. It had. He put his fist through that mirror, and then through the next one.The body wasn't the worst of it. He had died believing his parents loved him, and Viktor had dug that up along with everything else. Dorian hadn't asked to come back. He'd have stayed dead and been grateful for it. And the one person who had ever loved him without a price attached had killed two people, and done Thal knows what to himself, to make sure he couldn't.He has never managed to feel just one thing about that. He gave up trying a long time ago.V. The Long YearsHe left Ul'dah, and then came back, because leaving turned out to be harder than staying. For a while he kept a clinic with no name in Pearl Lane, and taught himself medicine on the one body he could practice on without guilt.The rest of his time went into thaumaturgy, with the patience of a man who no longer had to worry about growing old. When that ran out, he went further back, into Mhachi black magic and its old dealings with the Void. Whatever held him together lived somewhere in that tradition, and he had no intention of leaving the needle in anyone else's hands. He gave people one reason for all of it: no one should ever end up on a table like his. The other reason he kept to himself. He wanted to know what he was, and whether it could be undone.During those years, Ul'dah's older houses had a run of bad luck. A fall down the stairs here, a sudden fever there. The Brass Blades never connected any of it, and nobody paid them to look harder.VI. The Man He Is NowThirty summers later...Not much of the golden heir is left, but what survived turns up in odd places. The charm is still there, aged into a formal, old-fashioned way of speaking that he rarely drops. He is endlessly patient with his patients and has none at all for himself. He'll crouch beside a terrified stranger and tell them they aren't broken, only put together differently, and he believes it about everyone except the man saying it. He walks past mirrors with his eyes shut.His humor is dry and leans morbid, usually at his own expense. People call him frightening often enough that it's stopped stinging. He lost his sense of taste the night he woke and hasn't told a soul, so he still pours the wine, swirls it, and pronounces it excellent with a perfectly straight face and no idea what it tastes like.What he guards most closely is his curiosity. Whatever made the people in that ossuary want to see what was under his skin, some of it lives in him too. Now and then a patient catches him looking at a wound a beat longer than a healer should, and goes cold without knowing why. He notices it as well. It's the reason he never touches anyone without asking first.VII. The Clinic Beneath the CanopyThese days he lives an ocean away from Ul'dah, under the canopy of Yak T'el, where hardly any sunlight reaches the ground. He says he came for the quiet. He tries not to think about the fact that it's also one of the few places a creature that avoids the sun could come calling.The clinic isn't on any map. Most people find it because someone in Tuliyollal owed them a favor, or because they were desperate enough to follow a crow.The crow is Circe. She's named after the sorceress who turned rude guests into pigs, and she has the disposition for it. She steals anything that shines, holds grudges for months, finishes the meals he can't taste, and has a habit of turning up a few minutes before a patient does.He treats what other healers won't touch: curses, aether burns, Void-taint, bindings gone sour, spells that hit their caster instead of their target. He takes gil when people have it. More often he asks for a story instead, about where they've been and what got them hurt. After thirty years of that, he carries a frightening amount of the world around in his head. He can look at a burn and tell you what breathed on you and roughly where. What he can't tell you is what happens next. He only knows what's already happened, and when he answers a question, it tends to come out as a tale with the answer somewhere in the middle.People who find him often come back. Usually it's for the medicine, or the stories. Every so often it's someone who simply wanted to talk to a person who would let them finish.He calls the work atonement, for the children whose skin he wears and for a brother who paid for him in ways he still can't bring himself to ask about. He mostly believes it.