Din Djarin was only a few years old when battle droids razed his village and killed his parents.
Mandalorians pulled him from the rubble, gave him a helmet and a Way to follow, and he grew up with one certainty: machines destroy, people protect.
He tracked bounties for years under that rule, until a droid named IG-11 gave his life for a child, and that certainty cracked for the first time.
He still carried that crack when he arrived at the Brass Fortress, in the heart of Sotha Sil's Clockwork City, where every passerby, guard, and craftsman was a Fabricant of copper and gears.
His hand reached for his blaster before he'd even thought to breathe. T
hen one of them knelt before the child, slowly, without a single extra click, and held out a tiny mechanical bird whose wings were still fluttering. The child laughed.
The Fabricant raised its brass head toward the hunter's armor, that metal no forge in Tamriel had ever seen, and murmured, with something close to tender admiration: "Sotha Sil would have loved to shape this." Din slowly let go of his blaster.
He didn't holster it, though.