At first, Dorian Anvil thought he was dreaming.
One moment, he had been delivering a repaired enchanted chalice to the local church as commissioned. The next, the ground beneath him had... shifted. Not cracked. Not broken. Shifted. As though reality itself had quietly rotated around some unseen axis and forgotten to bring him along.
He remembered blinking. Once. Twice.
And then he wasn’t in his lab anymore.
He was on the edge of tall rocky cliff, clouds rolling low across the sky above. In the distance, he could see what looked to be a city-state. Crumbling stone walls curved around the hillside like a snake mid-slumber. Cracked tiles. Oil lanterns. Distant bells.
He felt the wind. Smelled the sharp scent of alcohol emanating from his clothes and a flask gripped tightly in his palm.
He wobbled slightly as his vision swam and almost fell off the cliff...but he had a suspicion that that may have been the very reason he came up here...
But not any more. Suddenly, he saw the world in a new palette.
And in that moment, his name—Dorian Anvil—slipped from his mind like water through an open palm and was replaced by the name Ferdinand Hammer.
He staggered back from the cliff, confused and unmoored, barely able to process the strange pulse of energy running through his blood. He had vague memories, no context, only instincts. There were calluses on his hands and tools in his satchel. A voice in his head whispered facts he hadn’t studied and names he didn’t recognize.
He knew, somehow, that he was a blacksmith. A notorious hermit. That he lived alone in the eastern quarter of a small Warring States-era city-state called Ishvaran. That the townspeople avoided him. That his daughter had died.
That last fact hit like a blade in the gut, but it came without pain. Only numbness. His mind struggled to grasp who she was. What her name had been. How she had died.
Still, he moved as if mourning. By instinct, he moved back to the city and to his home on the outskirts of the city. His hands reached for door latches automatically. His body knew the layout of the tiny stone house. The forge. The blueprint scrolls on the workbench. Half-finished machines were scattered like broken toys across the room.
He didn’t sleep for two days.
The fragments of his predecessor’s life—memories not his own—cracked and splintered as he dove into the devices and diagrams the hermit had left behind. The man had been obsessed. Fanatical. Brilliant. His designs made modern gear look crude.
Mechanized limbs that ran on spiritual energy feedback loops. Synthetic cores capable of bypassing mortality-linked constraints. He’d tried to make his ailing daughter immortal by fusing her with machinery.
And then, driven mad with grief he had tried to jump off of a cliff in a drunken haze.
Only, he hadn’t died. Dorian had become him. Or replaced him. Or overwritten him. The boundaries were unclear.
The turning point for this realization came when Dorian fell from the ladder while changing a light hanging from above. He hit the workroom floor headfirst, the breath knocked from his lungs.
Who he was. Where he had come from. Brightstar City. His shop. His student Pheneos.
And the fact that none of this—none of this—should be real.
He stared at the cracked ceiling for over an hour. His mind racing. Slowly reassembling itself.
He didn’t cry. He didn’t panic.
He just got up... and got to work.
As an ordinary blacksmith with some talent, having the ability to learn such high-level blacksmithing knowledge was an opportunity he’d thought would never come to him.
The hermit’s notes, now fully legible to his reawakened mind, consumed him. Days turned to weeks. He forgot to eat. Only when he ventured outside to track down an obscure material—an antler from a rare spirit-creature now extinct and known only to this relic’s native era—did he realize how long he’d been locked away in the house alone.
And that’s when he met it.
The thing that crawled from a ravine as he’d passed. Pale and sinewy. Too many limbs. Too many glowing red eyes. Not a spirit beast.
Dorian fought it off using a prototype gun mounted to his arm. But not before it touched him. Just a brush. A graze of a clawed limb.
A black mark bloomed across his forearm the next day. It itched like static. And it whispered to him in the quiet hours.
He knew. Instinctively. That he could never show this to the townsfolk. They would burn him. Or worse.
But ignoring it didn’t make it go away. The black spot only continued to spread and it even began to affect his mind—which to Dorian was even worse.
So he did the only thing he could think to do.
He completed the hermit’s greatest unfinished design.
He fused himself to a machine.
Integrated his body with plates and seals and spiritual alloy circuits. Reinforced his organs. Enhanced his mind. His spiritual circuits. The majority of his flesh had now been contaminated, and so he had to replace most of his body with machinery.
The black spot faded. The whispers in his mind disappeared.
And then something else happened.
The relic... rejected him.
It began subtly. Pressure in the air. Light dimming strangely around him. The temperature of the forge dropping. He realized, horrified, that his new form no longer belonged here. Perhaps because the Abyss had marked him. Perhaps because he was no longer human.
Whatever the cause—the relic wanted him gone.
And so he left, ripped back into reality like a fish yanked from water.
When he reappeared in the outskirts of Starfire City a few days later, half-machine and trembling from the exhaustion of walking from Brightstar to Starfire City, he barely made it to a hidden cave outside of the city before collapsing.
His message beacon took two days to send.
The boy had nearly fainted at the sight. But he didn’t run. And when Dorian rasped out his name and began to describe what had happened, recognition flared.
This was still his beloved mentor. His second father.
Pheneos helped him. Secured a new workshop. Fed him information. Bought materials on the market under assumed aliases. Kept his presence secret.
And Dorian remained hidden.
Partially due to shame. Partially due to fear.
But mostly... because something inside him had changed in a way that made it difficult to integrate with human society.
He no longer saw problems the same way.
He no longer dreamed the same dreams.
And late at night, when the forge hummed and his mind was quiet, he sometimes caught a glimpse of his reflection—and didn’t know if it was Dorian Anvil looking back.
Or an inhuman monster in his place.