Years ago, before the name Singed was whispered with fear in the alleys, there was a man named Corin Reveck. And his workshop was not a cave of chemical nightmares, but a sanctuary of science and hope.
The air in the Piltover workshop smelled of clean machine oil and polished cherrywood. Corin Reveck, a man whose face had not yet known the scars of fire or the weight of despair, leaned over a delicate hand prosthesis. His long, deft fingers adjusted a servomotor no bigger than a fingernail. At his side, a boy no older than ten, with hair as white as freshly fallen snow, silently handed him tools with flawless efficiency. His eyes—already a striking violet—followed every movement of his master with a concentration that belied his age.
"No, Kaen," Corin said gently. "The star-head screwdriver. The torque must be precise, or the thumb gear will misalign."
"Yes, Master Corin," the boy answered, his voice clear and respectful, handing over the correct tool without hesitation.
Corin smiled—a rare gesture that lit up his stern features. He had found Kaen on the streets of Zaun, an orphan with a mind as sharp as his features. In him, Corin saw not only a pupil, but a legacy.
The workshop door opened with a cheerful creak, and a burst of sunlight spilled in, followed by a little girl with her hair in a tight bun, dressed like a dancer. It was Orianna.
"Kaen!" she called, her voice like a melody. "Papa, you're making Kaen work too much again! He promised he'd help me practice my dance steps!"
Kaen looked up, and a small, genuine, shy smile touched his face. Corin sighed, though there was affection in the sound. "An inventor's work never ends. And Kaen is my best apprentice."
"But the best apprentices need to play too," Orianna insisted, grabbing Kaen's hand. "Come on! I want to show you the new automaton at the theater square!"
Kaen glanced at Corin, seeking permission. Corin nodded. "Go. But don't be late. Progress waits for no one."
As the two children ran out of the workshop, their laughter echoing down the hall, Corin lingered by the door. He saw the way Kaen looked at his daughter—with a protective devotion. He saw the way Orianna pulled Kaen out of his shell of seriousness. They were two halves of a whole. Love and legacy. In that moment, in the peaceful stillness of his workshop, he naively believed he could have both.
...
The night everything changed, rain poured over Piltover—but the true poison rose from below. A chemical explosion in Zaun, a disaster most Piltovians dismissed as a filthy, distant problem. Not Orianna. Her heart, too big and too compassionate for her small body, had pulled her downward, into the epicenter of suffering.
The workshop door burst open with a desperate crash. Kaen stumbled in, his face twisted in absolute panic. He carried Orianna in his arms. She was limp, her skin pale with a sickly hue, her breath a faint, rattling wheeze.
"MASTER!" Kaen cried, his voice breaking with despair.
Corin turned—and the world stopped. The color drained from his face. The tools slipped from his hands, the metallic clang echoing in the sudden, terrible silence. He rushed forward, tore Orianna from Kaen's arms with frantic strength, and laid her on a cot. His hands, once steady and precise, now trembled as he connected tubes, checked her vitals, and searched desperately for an antidote that did not exist. The toxin was corrosive, devouring her lungs from the inside. All his knowledge, all his science, was useless against the fragility of flesh.
"The explosion in the sump," Kaen gasped. "I told her not to go. I told her it was dangerous! But she wanted to help… she handed out masks… she shared hers…" He clutched his head, his body shaking with guilt. "It's my fault! I should have stopped her! I should have—!"
Corin didn't hear him. His world had narrowed to his daughter's fragile form. He shoved Kaen aside without thinking, his touch no longer that of a mentor but of a terrified father. His scientific mind wrestled with the tide of panic. He ignored his pupil, ignored everything but Orianna's faint heartbeat.
Kaen stood drenched in rain and guilt, helplessly watching the man he admired fall apart, his world collapsing into a desperate struggle to save a life already slipping away.
...
The months that followed were a descent into hell. Corin Reveck died, and from his ashes, Singed was born. The workshop was now in the depths of Zaun, where ethics were a luxury. The air was thick with acrid chemicals, the light dim. Orianna lay in a glass capsule, submerged in a stabilizing fluid, her life barely sustained by a network of tubes and machines that hummed day and night. She was in a coma, her body slowly deteriorating. Singed watched her endlessly, his own health decaying, his mind consumed by one obsession: to defeat death.
Kaen, now a somber young man, lingered in the shadows, a silent figure of guilt. He watched his master spiral into despair, watched science twist into dark obsession.
One night, he approached Singed, who had dozed off in his chair.
"Master," Kaen said, his voice steady with a new and terrible resolve.
Singed startled awake.
"Experiment on me," Kaen continued. "Not with current science. You must go further." He glanced at his own body—young, healthy, strong. "You always said my adaptability was… unprecedented. Find a way to strengthen the body, to make it resistant to toxin. To defeat death. Use my flesh to find the answer. Find a way to regenerate her lungs. Find a way to save her."
Singed turned slowly. He looked at his pupil kneeling before him. He saw the guilt consuming him, but he also saw opportunity. A perfect test subject. A willing vessel. For an instant, doubt flickered across his face—an echo of the man he had once been, the mentor who cared for that boy. But then, his gaze shifted to Orianna.
Love and legacy…
"Very well," he whispered, morality surrendering to desperation.
...
What followed was a blur of pain and transformation. The diagrams in Singed's notebooks grew bolder, more inhuman. Kaen endured it all: injections of raw Shimmer, genetic modifications, tissue grafts. His body did not break. It adapted. It became stronger, faster, his senses sharpened. But the process hollowed him out, erasing the boy he had once been. Singed, lost in obsession, crossed every ethical boundary. The mutation must survive. He saw Kaen's resilience not as a wonder, but as a path. A path to Orianna's salvation.
Until, one day, the subject no longer responded.
Singed—his face now disfigured, his scalp bare—stood over Kaen's lifeless body on the operating table. The boy's heart had stopped. His adaptability had finally met its limit.
Subject K, the ideal prototype, had failed. The path was closed. He had sacrificed his pupil, his legacy, and gained nothing in return.
"Love and legacy," he rasped to the motionless figure, "are sacrifices we make for progress."
He gathered his notes and abandoned the lab, sealing the door behind him. He left his dead pupil's body to rot, a failed offering on the altar of obsession.
It was in that sealed lab that a new consciousness flickered and came alive.
Present.
In his cavernous laboratory—the true heart of his operations—Singed watched his creation. Suspended in a glass tank filled with greenish fluid floated a creature resembling a giant axolotl, its body covered in surgical scars and tubes. Rio.
Memories flickered: his daughter's smiling face, Orianna's broken body, his pupil's determined eyes, Kaen's lifeless corpse. Ghosts of a past he had buried.
He turned to pick up a vial when a sound froze him. The lab door—which should have been inaccessible—opened with a soft creak.
A figure stood in the doorway. Tall, with disheveled silver-white hair and wearing a ridiculous jacket. The figure stepped in, violet eyes with feline pupils scanning the laboratory with detached curiosity.
"Well, well," said the voice—completely monotone, devoid of the respect or fear his original pupil had always shown. "A secret underground lab. The place is a little depressing, and the smell is awful. Though the mad scientist cave aesthetic is very well executed. My compliments."
Singed froze, the vial slipping from his fingers and shattering on the floor. Impossible. Yet there he was. His failed experiment. His dead pupil. Standing. Staring at him as if he were some curiosity in a museum.
Kaen Vexis smiled, flashing fangs he had never possessed before.
"Excuse me, doctor," he said. "I had an appointment for an evaluation of my artistic schizophrenia. I hope I'm not late."