Kara Makes Things!

But he knew the Nein. 

He knew their stories. He learnt how they started, how they progressed. He had heard vague reports here and there– witnesses to the dramatics in Zadash, rangers trying to track the Beacon, those few scrying attempts before the Nein got wise and shoved it in a bag– before he met them. And when he met them, he had thought they were foolish for asking for favours so easily and readily, so willing to put themselves in debt as a means to just get by. So willing to barter for his friendship with smiles and teasing and their irreverent curiosity. 

Essek met Mollymauk through the Nein and their easy smiles and fierce protection. He met Mollymauk through Jester trying to get him to draw cards from a deck and Beau deciding that drinking together was the best way to know each other. And in the face of all that was unforgivable that he had done, he met Mollymauk in Caleb’s insistence that he was still worth saving. 

So when he sees the tiefling torn apart, mourned by the Nein in the hellish landscape of a dying district of a ruined city in the Astral Sea, and Caleb rushing from death to trying to plead for that tiefling’s life, Essek’s heart broke for them. He had watched Caleb die moments ago– this unspoken, new affection he was no longer denying wrenched from him as he lashed out in retaliation– and now the man was a step away from pleading to the gods themselves with a transmuter stone he had worked and willed into shape for months as a testament to his own power against the torn chest of the creature that had just murdered him. 

the Dorian mode is the second mode of the major scale MEANING if you take a classic C Major scale (c d e f g a b c) and go from the SECOND note instead of the first (d e f g a b c d) you get D Dorian

what makes Dorian unique is the fact that it is, at its core, a sad scale. the only thing is it's not as sad as a traditional minor scale, one of its notes is raised so as you go up the scale, you get a strange lightness

and it matches Dorian Storm because he started as the happy second son of a privileged family (major, the "perfect" scale)

but as he grew he realized he didn't fit there, didn't work there, what he wanted to be could never work in his family (minor)

so when he left to discover himself, he found beauty in his differences and a lightness in his step and settled into a less mournful, less perfect, appreciative, ethereal and introspective person (dorian)

Because it’s an amazing dynamic to see.

The way I consider the question of Molly and Kingsley's dichotomy vs singularity is that both conditions are true at once.

Kingsley IS Molly. He has Molly's memories (how accessible they are at all times notwithstanding). Kingsley has memories from the circus and from when Molly was within Lucien. He remembers the moment Lucien was overcome, and "the warm catharsis of letting go." Kingsley recognized Molly's friends when he woke up like they were some kind of Jungian archetypes baked into his psyche. Caduceus' request that brought Kingsley to life was to "put it back."

Kingsley IS NOT Molly, and could never be. Molly was a being without a soul, described as a fragment and an "aberration." Probably the most interesting and comprehensive description comes from what Taliesin's intentions behind Molly were: "a body that the soul left and the body just kept moving. Just whatever was in there got pulled out, went to the Raven Queen, and the body just continued walking." (Tal, C2 wrap-up @ 11:40). At the Raise Dead ritual, we have Matt's brief questioning of whether whole souls can "grow from but a piece." Whatever Kingsley's case, he doesn't seem like a body without a soul. He came from a spell that resurrects a soul, that "put[s] it back." Molly resulted from a cosmic aberration, "a total blank slate." They are fundamentally different.

Soft times with a robot and a rock.