HOME: Velasco Reef, Palau Islands, Oceania
MOST LIKELY TO BE FOUND:
Missing. Somewhere overboard, exploring the vast expanse of the ocean and attempting communication with other luminous beings.
FAVORITE QUOTE: “Be calm. Nature will answer.
Honorable mention: “Not safe”
WHAT HE WOULD WANT YOU TO REMEMBER: Velasco Reef at sunrise—alive, radiant, and full of others like him before the veil ever opened.
The knowledge cartographer
Dorian Blackflame
Knowledge is information you have gathered. Wisdom is the ability to apply that knowledge. Now imagine experiencing the world not through five senses, but through eight living arms capable of tasting as they touch, skin that perceives light and color, a mind that thinks in images rather than words, and an awareness able to recognize patterns, chemistry, motion, and possibility simultaneously. Now allow that perception to mature over more than three centuries. Only then can you begin to understand the being that exists in no other capacity on Earth.
Octopuses are not creatures of haste. They observe before they act. Every movement, every current, every vibration, every change in chemistry is another piece of information gathered before a decision is made. They experience the world as a living web of relationships rather than a sequence of isolated events.
Dorian is a fully sentient octopus, whose soul, memory and awareness expanded in a way we cannot truly fathom. A single shared thought may contain centuries of history, languages, relationships, symbols, and discoveries, all understood as one interconnected whole.
Through his perception and extraordinary ability to follow countless interconnected threads simultaneously, Dorian serves as Le Chroí's Knowledge Cartographer. He transforms scattered fragments into understanding, helping the crew uncover the histories, cultures, and mysteries hidden beneath every expedition.
"Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter."
-Yoda
Ember approaches the Library aboard Le Chroí, her thoughts spiraling like a flame craving oxygen. The ship’s floorboards creak beneath her feet, warning Dorian of her approach. When she reaches the door, she pauses, attempting to organize her thoughts into images and words he can understand and answer. She draws one steadying breath and waits for the connection. On the other side of the door, the blue spiorad stone set into Dorian’s forehead begins to glow faintly. Ember holds a single thought in her mind. A question.
May I enter?
Dorian opens his mind, forming the link between them through Le Chroí’s living threads. Ember draws a sharp breath as his consciousness flows into hers—not overwhelming her, but suddenly present, vast and luminous. An image appears in her mind: two shells resting together outside the entrance to a den. Then comes the smooth cadence of his voice within her thoughts.
Always, den partner.
A TEAR IN THE VEIL BETWEEN WORLDS
We do not know exactly what year Dorian was born. We know only that he was born in Velasco Reef in the Palau Islands.
Sometime before he reached maturity, a tear opened in the veil between worlds and pulled him into another reality. Rock, sediment, coral, and other sea life were drawn violently toward it in what appeared to be an explosion in reverse. Dorian was pulled through with them. Several of his arms were badly damaged. One of his branchial hearts stopped completely, and internal bleeding threatened his systemic heart. He was dying.
As he passed through the other side of the veil, the water changed. Saltwater from the reef mixed rapidly with the water of the other world, burning against his body like fire as the salinity fell. The violent current carried him into the shallows and pushed him onto a pale sandy shore, where he lay bleeding and struggling to understand the threat around him.
Flashes of a violent battle raged across the unfamiliar landscape. Explosions tore through the air. Fire and smoke swallowed the horizon. Everywhere Dorian looked, bipedal beings unlike any species he had ever encountered fought among the ruins. As one wave of warriors pushed its enemy back, nearly fifty beings rushed toward the tear in the veil. Streams of blue light poured from their hands, weapons, and staffs, weaving together as they attempted to close the rupture before more of Dorian’s world could be pulled through.
Amid the chaos, one of the beings noticed him.
“Tá beatha an domhain anseo.”
Earthly life is here.
A female fae approached and knelt beside him. Her skin was cool and pale white, and there was genuine sorrow in her expression as she looked into Dorian’s eyes. She placed both hands gently over his wounded body and closed her eyes.
“Bí slán. Go bhfillidh an spiorad.”
Be whole. May your spirit return.
As Dorian began to lose consciousness, he felt an immediate warmth and peace. White light flooded his senses until there was nothing else. After that, there were no images, memories, or awareness for a very long time.When Dorian awoke, he had been returned to Velasco Reef—but the reef had changed.
His earliest dateable memory is of a journal written by Paul Klein on 27 August 1969. For a time, Dorian attempted to live as he had before the tear in the veil. He mated, made a den, and watched as a generation of day octopus lived, reproduced, and died around him.
He could still understand their intentions through movement, touch, and changes in color, but he soon realized that his own mind had expanded far beyond the limits of his species’ natural communication. He carried questions, memories, and complex thoughts that he had no way to share with them. After an entire life cycle passed in Velasco Reef and Dorian remained unchanged, he left his den and began searching for other minds capable of reaching his own.
For decades, Dorian travelled the world, forming connections with everything from the smallest living organisms to the largest mammals on the planet. Once he discovered that he could survive and travel beyond the water, he began attempting to communicate with humans. It was through those relationships that he finally understood the true scale of what he had been seeking. He did not merely want companionship. He needed a connection large enough to hold the vastness of his mind.
Le Chroí found him at Velasco Reef after he had lost a human companion whom he called his den partner.
Dorian’s mind is a vast expanse of knowledge connected through a web of memories, sensations, and associations. Much like a human carrying an entire lifetime of knowledge, questions, memories, and thoughts with no one to share them with, Dorian needs to open that connection to another consciousness. Without somewhere for those thoughts to travel, the web begins to fold inward until it becomes a maze.
Aboard Le Chroí, he became a thread within the greater connection shared by the Knotbound crew. Through the ship’s living threads, he can communicate with every member of the crew at once—or with no one at all, if he chooses. His mind remains entirely his own, but he will never again be left alone with the full weight of his intelligence and sentient experience.
Aboard Le Chroí, Dorian has created more than thirty new maps, identified previously unknown healing properties, and documented species never recorded in any human field guide. Yet the greatest discovery he made aboard her was not a place, a remedy, or a living creature.
It was connection.
The knowledge that once folded endlessly inward can now travel through Le Chroí’s living threads, becoming maps, warnings, memories, questions, and wonder shared among the Knotbound crew. As Knowledge Cartographer and Keeper of the Thread, Dorian maps not only the worlds they enter, but the unseen connections between them—ensuring that no discovery, no living voice, and no member of the crew is ever left entirely alone.
