Dorian

Lore & Background

Dorian's origin is one of the more quietly devastating threads in the series. As a child, he was taken from the human world by the Fae and raised among them, absorbing their logic, their sense of time, and their relationship to the natural world in a way that no ordinary human education could replicate. He was not made into a Fae; he remained human in biology and, ultimately, in the shape of his desires. But the Fae imprint on his mind is permanent, and it colors every perception he has of the world that still expects him to think in straight lines and fixed seasons.

When he re-enters the human world and settles into the school where Chise studies, he carries that double vision without ever quite explaining it. To his classmates he is simply an odd, slightly distant boy. To the reader, he is a walking reminder that the Fae do not merely threaten the human world from the outside; they reach into it, take pieces of it, and reshape those pieces into something that can no longer be put back. His knowledge of Fae customs, their games, their cruelty and their strange tenderness, makes him a potential ally, a potential danger, and a mirror held up to Chise's own position as a human who now walks between two worlds.

His relationship to the Fae who raised him is layered with the particular grief of a child who was loved in a way that was not, in the end, love as a human would recognize it. The Fae took him, shaped him, and in their own alien fashion considered the transaction complete. Dorian survived that, and the survival itself is a kind of quiet defiance that the series rewards with a steady, understated dignity.

In Their Own Story

The corridor after the last bell was empty except for the smell of chalk dust and old radiator heat. Dorian stood by the window, watching the November light flatten the courtyard into a single grey sheet. He did not look at the other students filing out in their clusters of laughter. He was listening to something beneath the sound of their voices, a low hum in the stone walls that his Fae-taught ear could place: a root system shifting, a vein of water changing course beneath the foundation. The building was breathing. It always breathed, if you knew how to listen, and he had known how since he was old enough to walk in a place where the walls walked back.

He pressed his fingertips to the glass. Outside, a single leaf detached from the bare elm and spiralled down with a patience that no wind could explain. He watched it land. He did not smile. He simply filed it away in the part of his memory that was not quite human, where the Fae had taught him to keep the small, strange, beautiful things that the human world would call coincidence. Then he turned, shouldered his bag, and walked out into the ordinary, fragile afternoon.

Reader's Guide

Dorian is a human male, the product of a childhood spent raised among the Fae before his return to the human world. He first appears in the school setting, attending the same institution as Chise Hatori, and is quickly marked as different by the quiet, almost archaeological way he observes things that no one else notices.

His personality is reserved and watchful. He does not perform his otherness; he simply carries it. Where Chise's Fae-adjacent life is loud with Elphaba, with the Magus, with the constant pressure of a world that wants to consume her, Dorian's is a low, steady hum. He knows what the Fae are capable of because he lived inside their logic for years, and that knowledge makes him cautious, a little sad, and very difficult to fully read.

His key relationship in the early story is with Chise, not as a romantic partner but as a fellow student who, unlike the others, does not flinch from the strange things that happen around her. He is a peer who has his own strange history, and that shared liminality creates a quiet mutual recognition. His relationship to the Fae who raised him is the wound underneath everything: a childhood of alien tenderness that was never quite tenderness, a debt of existence that he cannot repay and does not want to.

His arc, as it unfolds, is one of a person trying to build a human life on a foundation that was laid by non-humans, and deciding, day by day, which parts of himself he keeps and which he lets the human world slowly overwrite. The unresolved thread is whether the Fae will ever come looking for what they took, and whether Dorian's human life can survive that retrieval.

Did You Know?

• Dorian's Fae upbringing means he internalised a non-human sense of time and causality, which makes his reactions to mundane school events feel subtly off-key to his classmates.
• He is a rare example in the series of a human who was not taken by the Fae as a threat or a trade but as a child to be raised, making his Fae knowledge experiential rather than academic.
• His presence in the school setting creates a quiet parallel to Chise's own position: both are humans who have been shaped by the Fae, yet neither is Fae, and both must navigate the gap.
• The Fae's relationship to Dorian reflects a recurring theme in the series: their affection is real but operates on a logic that is fundamentally incompatible with human expectations of love and obligation.