Enon

  Enon's first moments were in the dirt. The best place to grow a person (or a human-adjacent thing) is a womb, of course; but if you don't have any lying around, earth burial is roughly the same. It would be another month or so until he'd quicken to an acceptable level of consciousness, but as soon as he was able to take orders, his courtly mage mistress would slap a uniform on him and drop him into service alongside the twenty or so other homunculi who served the royal family. Similar but not entirely identical, this small unit did it all--agents in the field, heralds of decrees both great and terrible, even household servants now and then, all roles performed with an inhuman care and efficiency by blindly loyal, not-quite-sapient machines.

  Enon would be fortunate. Although his kind were notorious for being able to recover naturally even from grievous wounds, he would be working in the home instead of sent to fight and scout afield, wandering the palace grounds with the two sons of the reigning king. Hunting, sparring, and other dalliances were part of a royal education, after all, and a homunculus would be more than enough to keep up with two rambunctious children with little regard for the stamina of adults. Despite their recognition of him as a serving machine, the boys treated Enon with a companionable kindness, although whether he was more of a friend or a dog to them, he could not say. But whatever he was to them, he was learning, adapting, putting new ideas together and beginning to come into his own in a way that his homunculi brethren did not.

  It would be a tragic day when the boys lost their playmate. It was not the first attempt on their lives, but certainly the closest call--thankfully Enon had been with them and at the ready, managing to fell the intruders before they could lay a hand on either potential heir. But in the process he'd been mortally wounded several times over; unsure if even the supernatural healing powers of a homunculus would save his children's toy, the king had the body sent away, returned to his retained mage for disposal. But she had been watching, studying the quirks in Enon's behaviour, and when his mangled corpse was laid out on her table for decommissioning, she had something different in mind for him.

  Not every part was useable, but then, it didn't have to be. High in his mistress's tower was an elegant study, but low in the castle, even below the dungeons, lay her gruesome lab. She had but to pick and choose from the parts of fallen homunculi and failed starters, taking a length of golden thread to stitch the pieces together into a working whole. Given time, Enon recovered and returned to consciousness; he'd spend months down there in the dark as her pet project, plied with lessons and discussion, reshaped to be far more independent than her other creations but smart enough to blend in with them all the same. What she needed was a proper henchman, and in Enon she was determined to create it.

  When he returned to work, Enon was content to serve, finding himself in all manner of strange operations. Collecting packages, delivering shady dealings, even dumping the body of a mysteriously dead court member--it was all under orders, a stern command from his mistress that he quite literally could not ignore. So when she sent him afield one day with specific instructions on capturing a certain diabolical entity, he didn't think much of having to snatch up the wayward nun who contained the evil spirit. His single mission was to return the entity and its vessel to his mistress intact, a tall order considering every other group also looking to get their hands on them; but while the endless march was nothing to Enon, it was the vessel, Verity, who would prove his weakness. Suspicion soon turned to inquisitive friendliness; detours and rest stops became less of inconveniences and more chances to put off their final destination. The blind trust Verity put in Enon stung all the more when they did finally make it back to his home castle, where his mistress cared little for Enon's pleas to go easy on the nun. She didn't hesitate in her ritual to draw out the entity for her own purposes--but whether it would have worked, no one could say. The spell started to fold; the guards burst into the room; whether magical underestimation or his own 'accidental' tipoff would have done his mistress in first, Enon cared little. There was just enough time in the chaos to spirit Verity out of the castle before Enon would be pushed away by the entity itself, vessel and cargo escaping into the night where he could not follow. And then, he supposed, it was over.

It was, of course, not over. Escaping from one captor was not the end of the story for Verity. And the more Enon pictured that untimely fate, the more he felt he had to follow. He'd tracked Verity down time and again before, and this time was the same. Rumours of another run-in with danger only spurred him on. And when he was finally able to catch up, storming in to pluck Verity from danger for the nth time, he had no wish for forgiveness or gratitude--just for Verity's safety, at any expense, even and especially his own.

  Fortunately for Enon, Verity is not one to hold grudges. Time and work go a long way, and those bitter days seem far behind the two. Without any more orders to follow, Enon is free to do as he pleases, which these days is providing for his diminutive friend and exploring together what they haven't yet seen. The chaos and adventure is hardly over yet, but even someone as stoic as Enon has to admit that.... he really likes being close to Verity.... closer still, if he's lucky.