Flint

Human / Sorcerer

Submitted character story

You are a hero who negotiates where others escalate, who walked the King's Road because civilization mattered even before Mechanus remade you. What brought you back was not defiance but the wooden toy you still carry, proof that love survives even when memory fractures. You exist in the space between two incompatible truths, human loss and mechanical certainty, and neither one will let you rest until you resolve it. Your table will remember you as the sorcerer who spoke of balance but fought for something older.

Defining moment: I lived in the town I was born in and never saw reason to leave it.

I worked with Sestian, a tinkerer whose mind was always half in invention. He built things people needed. I built things people smiled at—small toys, moving parts, simple joys. It felt like enough. I thought it would always be enough.

I built a life with Julia.
That part is harder to hold clearly.
Not because it didn’t matter—but because something interferes when I try to keep it whole. Names, moments, expressions… they don’t vanish. They misalign, like components placed slightly out of true.

We had children.
Two.
The second was Daniel.
The first… I cannot hold her name.
That is not the same as not knowing it.
It feels more like trying to read something that has been partially erased but not fully removed. The shape of it remains, even when the letters do not.
I know I had a daughter.
And I know I was meant to remember her more easily than this.

The incident does not fit cleanly into anything that came before it.

I was in Sestian’s workshop with Daniel when the air changed. Light appeared without source. Sound followed—metallic, rhythmic—like the world had begun to misbehave in an ordered way.
Then a voice entered thought directly.

“A deal was struck. Balance must be maintained. We take, so that we may give.”

I did not understand it.
I still do not, not fully.

What I remember most clearly is motion.
Hands—too many, too precise—reaching. Daniel being taken from me. Not violently. Not carelessly. Correctly, as though resistance had already been accounted for.
I tried to stop it.

My body moved. My outcome did not change.
I remember being taken next. Not as an afterthought, but as a necessary adjustment in a larger process.

The last thing I saw was light swallowing distance.
What followed is not absence. It is reorganisation.
Mechanus—or something aligned with it—does not interpret the world through mercy or cruelty. Only alignment. I was taught structure. Equilibrium. The idea that imbalance is not suffering, but error requiring correction.

My thoughts changed shape under that pressure.
Not erased.
Reweighted.

When I returned, I carried objects that were not mine.
One of them is a toy.
It is small. Wooden. Designed with careful joints that allow it to move in simple, looping patterns when wound correctly.
I know I made it.
I also know it was not for Daniel.
It was meant for my daughter.
The first child.
The one whose name I cannot reliably retrieve.
That fact produces something in me that does not resolve cleanly into logic. It does not fade. It remains.
Not as emotion in the way others describe it.
More like a persistent error state.
Now I exist between interpretations.

I can still remember Julia. Daniel. The town. The workshop. I can still feel loss, even when it does not always generate its expected responses.
But alongside it runs something else.

A second understanding.
That the world is not only something to feel—but something to correct.
They tell me I will be restored when balance is achieved.
I do not know if that is promise, or design.
I do not know if I am becoming something new… or being guided back to what I was.

So I continue.
Not fully as I was.
Not fully as they intend.
Because somewhere ahead lies the point where those two versions of me will no longer be able to coexist.
And I will have to choose which one survives it.

Running from something