Oryu Fayama was sixteen years old, though most would never have guessed it. Thin as a reed and quiet as a whisper, he passed through life as though he were half-faded, a boy unseen on the edges of Eidelon; the grandest city in the Land of Chromatica. Its towers shimmered with spell-light, its streets thrummed with invention and wonder. Yet Oryu lived far from that brilliance, in the shadows of Oryu Manor Orphanage, where neither magic nor kindness ever touched him.

  He had never known parents, only stern matrons and cruel children. To them, he was the runt, the weakling who could not carry a pail of water without spilling it. His offers of help were met with sharp rebukes, his attempts at friendship with jeers. Every day he was reminded: he was useless.

  At five years old, while wandering the manor’s forgotten crawlspaces, Oryu discovered a door half-buried in dust. Beyond it lay a sealed annex library, abandoned, with only a single round window casting a pale circle of light across the floor. To the boy, it was treasure beyond measure. There he found his true family: books.

  For eleven years, the hidden alcove became his sanctuary. He devoured everything the shelves offered; myths of gods locked in eternal wars, histories of empires long turned to ash, treatises on mechanical craft, and even forbidden tomes of magic left to rot in secrecy. The world outside dismissed him, but within those pages he found power.

  What should have taken years of formal schooling seemed to come naturally. Arcane principles, elemental manipulations, the delicate interplay between spellcraft and design; all of it unfolded in his mind as if remembered rather than learned. By his early teens he was building intricate clockwork devices, toys of brass and steel that whirred to life under his hands. Soon, they became more than toys. His creations walked. They obeyed. They fought. Primitive golems of gear and spell, crude but alive in their own uncanny way.

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  On his sixteenth birthday, the manor did not even remember he existed. No greetings, no meal, not a word. The silence pressed against him until it hurt. He fled to the annex library, heart hollow, and began the work that would change everything.

  With trembling hands, he sketched and soldered, carved runes into metal plating, binding wires and bone together with threads of his own spirit. He built what he longed for most: parents. A mother’s embrace, a father’s protection; if no one would give them to him, he would forge them himself. But something inside him had twisted over the years, unnoticed. All the cruel words, the shoves, the loneliness; they had fermented into bitterness. When he poured his soul into the constructs, it was not love alone that flowed into them.

  When the golems opened their eyes, they were no longer parents. They were monsters. They turned on his tormentors. Walls shattered, beds splintered, voices screamed and fell silent. The orphanage became a ruin of smoke and ash, and when the night ended, both his creations and his childhood lay broken in the rubble.

  Oryu Fayama fled into the dark world beyond, an exile marked by the blood of his own mistake. To those who survived, he was a curse. To himself, he was little more than a hollow shell.

  Yet destiny does not end in ruins. That night, as he collapsed into restless sleep beneath the stars, dreams claimed him; dreams of a girl with hair like wildfire and eyes as black as demon flame. She was waiting for him, unyielding, a shadow stitched into the fabric of his fate.

  And so began the story of the prodigy.