Dorian

Dorian’s defining contradiction is that the former healer who once served humanity becomes an immortal architect of its suffering. Betrayed by the gods, consumed by jealousy of Draco, and convinced that humans are beneath him, he pursues power and revenge; yet his attachment to Esme eventually makes the losses he tried to repress impossible to dismiss. His story turns on the distance between being able to command events and being able to live with their consequences.

Identity and Background

Dorian is a demigod, the son of Apollo, whom he describes as the god of the sun, music, medicine, and prophecy. Before his fall, Dorian used his own healing powers to help humanity and sought his father’s approval. That history matters: his hostility does not begin as simple indifference to people, but as a reversal of an identity once organized around service. When the gods judged demigods expendable, Dorian understood their decision as a betrayal of even those who had tried to do good.

He survives the demigod massacre by taking a toxin that makes him appear dead. He wakes days later to find every other demigod slain. The survival that might have been a reprieve instead leaves him alone, carrying both the knowledge of what happened and the conviction that the divine order has abandoned its own children. His later self-image as the sole surviving demigod is bound to this history of rejection and survival.

Immortality and Political Project

Dorian’s resentment focuses particularly on Draco. He watches the gods choose Draco as their leader of heroes, give him their power, and mark his back with tattoos bearing their symbols. To Dorian, the choice is a second injury: Draco has been selected over the gods’ own children, while Dorian, who had once served humanity, is left behind. Anger and jealousy harden into hatred, and Dorian seeks to destroy Draco, only to discover that Draco is immortal.

Dorian responds by making immortality part of his own plan. He finds a way to sustain it through the blood of the gifted and sets himself three objectives: become immortal, prevent Draco from succeeding in his mission, and let humanity collapse into its own chaos. He regards the first objective as accomplished, while the others remain obstacles. His account also connects his campaign to Draco’s efforts to find demigods: Dorian says he has slain those Draco found when Draco had not done so himself.

His force grows from people he finds amid upheaval. Dorian promises them lives without fear and the freedom to be who they want without others dictating otherwise. But the language of liberation conceals a hierarchy: he thinks of his recruits as weapons and insists that humans are beneath them—and beneath him. His closed fists at that thought make his contempt more than a political slogan; it is a conviction that shapes how he interprets power and who deserves to wield it.

The Doctor and Esme

Dorian’s public identity protects his private campaign. When Draco and Asher confront him at the hospital after discovering the truth, Dorian is confident that he is untouchable. He is known to humanity as a model citizen and presents himself as one of the world’s best doctors. In his calculation, killing him would destroy the Hero Society, leaving his opponents unable to recover. His professional standing is therefore both a disguise and a strategic shield: the healer he once was has become a reputation he can use to obstruct those opposing him.

His response to Esme begins in wary fascination. After she stands up to him in a supply closet, he thinks she believes she has won that encounter; what interests him instead is that she has shown a backbone. Curiosity gives way to intimacy. When Esme sleeps against his chest, Dorian tells himself he should let her go for both their sakes, but admits to himself that he is not ready to give up her taste and touch. He describes her as addictive, revealing a relationship he experiences as both attachment and dependence.

Esme, for her part, senses foreboding before their first kiss, as though their story will not end well. Hope briefly displaces that dread. Dorian’s own thoughts remain divided: he wants Esme close, but also believes he should release her. Later, while considering a future in which war remains the most probable outcome, he recalls the repeated judgment that he did not deserve her love. He insists that he does not want it, even as he remembers that she fell in love with him despite his warning. The contradiction is not resolved by denial; it returns with greater force after loss.

War, Victory, and Grief

Dorian enters the final conflict convinced that the future he wants is winning. He has checked his visions repeatedly, and war remains the leading probability; he expects victory. His certainty is sharpened by resentment of Draco and by his belief that Esme is better than he is. The visions give him a picture of what may happen, but they do not free him from the emotional consequences of his choices or from the possibility that others’ judgments are right.

During the solar eclipse, Dorian absorbs sunlight from around the globe. He intends to cover the earth in darkness for one day, not long enough to kill its plants and ruin nature, but long enough to make people suffer as he believes his people and he have suffered. Even the limit he places on the plan serves its retaliatory purpose: survival is necessary because suffering, rather than the planet’s destruction, is what he wants to inflict.

At the battle’s apparent turning point, Dorian declares, “You’ve lost, and we are free,” as Draco falls with a sword to his chest. The victory cry marks the outcome he had pursued, but not an uncomplicated triumph. In the aftermath, Dorian registers that his wife is dead and that death surrounds both sides. The scale of loss contrasts with the control he had expected to achieve through planning and power.

Love, Reversal, and Return

Dorian initially refuses to understand his grief as love. After Rose’s last breath brings his repressed feelings to the surface, Phillip tells him that he loved Esme and lost her, and that seeing the loss of Rose has made him feel Esme’s love and the loss of it. Dorian calls his time with Esme a brief, bright passing star and denies that it amounted to the love Phillip names. The exchange exposes the gap between Dorian’s self-protective account and the emotional truth another character identifies in him.

When a chance to start over is presented, Phillip warns Dorian against returning to his former villainous ways, saying that he gave up hate for love. Draco and Asher remain tense, prepared to fight depending on his answer. Dorian replies, “It’s done.” The answer is brief, but the circumstances give it weight: his former enemies do not assume that his change is secure, and he must answer them directly rather than rely on his past status or power.

In the new beginning, Dorian is addressed as Dr. Dorian when Esme enters his room. Her hazel eyes are fixed on him with annoyance; he is so struck by her presence that he forgets to breathe. The scene returns him to the doctor identity that once served as cover, but changes its emotional meaning: Esme is present again, and his immediate response is not calculation but stunned attention. Their encounter opens on recognition and renewed possibility, leaving the earlier life’s history of love, harm, and loss behind it without making that history irrelevant.

Narrative Role

Dorian’s first-person chapters make the reader inhabit the reasoning through which he turns injury into an ideology. The same voice that remembers healing humanity describes recruits as weapons, dismisses humans as inferior, and plans a day of global darkness as punishment. That closeness makes his self-justifications legible without making them sufficient: the narrative places his claims beside the people and losses that contradict his attempts to keep love at a distance.

His arc also binds the novel’s supernatural conflict to intimate accountability. Immortality, divine favor, blood, and future visions give Dorian extraordinary means, but none can erase the choices by which he uses them. Esme’s return and Phillip’s challenge redirect the story from victory alone toward the possibility of a different life. Dorian’s significance lies in that contested change: he is both the survivor who made revenge his purpose and the man confronted with the love and grief that purpose could not contain.