Ooo this fella ↓ looks very interesting I love the design!! Id love to know more about them and what happened to them (cuz it seems like a lot has happened)
Hii thank you for the question!! It occurs to me now that I should've added names to them but oh well xD
Anyway, this is Yrissia (although I've been meaning to change his name), and his story is... very rough. There is also a bit of lore attached to his story so buckle in xD
He is a guardian and was part of a family that led a pretty large group of people up in the Everlasting Winter (picture like Greenland except there has not been a summer season up there in millennia for reasons that will become clear).
Thing really changed when a collapse unearthed the entrance to a cave that had been sealed a very long time ago. Yrissia's youngest sibling, being bored and curious, snuck out to explore the cave by themselves and their pet wolf-dog, only to find a giant, glowing gem stone at the very heart of it, trapped behind a thick sheet of ice. It called to him and he began hacking away at the ice, pushing away his wolf-dog when it tried to stop him.
As soon his Yrissia's sibling's hand met with the exposed gemstone, an ancient god, trapped for countless years fled into his body. This backstory is very important for Yrissia because said god has been absolutely wrecked and twisted by all the time he had been restrained and isolated, and soon took out his wrath on everyone around him. The sibling became his vessel and he haunted the people and land, assuming absolute power and control over them all.
The deity is named Morscien, sometimes also referred to as Morscien Bruma, and is the god of winter, change and death (which is also why summer has never come to pass because his presence, sealed away or not, causes winter to last eternally on the land). And once he had calmed at least slightly, he knew his goal: to punish the one who had locked him away. But how does one kill another god?
Ezirmir is the name of the god he sought to punish; the god of souls and guardians. He is the one who takes a soul from the soul tree and delivers it to the mortal realm to fill any new guardian who may come into existence with life. He would be basically impossible to kill and perhaps Morscien realised that too, but Ezirmir did have a weak spot... and that was of course the guardians he cared so much about.
So, being the deity of change, discovery, experimentation and evolution was in his interest anyway and now it had an even greater purpose. He began to experiment both on humans and the few guardians he had access to (that being Yrissia and his family). He mainly tried to figure out a way how to sever their connection to Ezirmir, tear away all he held dear; but in time he was also starting to enjoy the process of science. It is part of his element after all.
Anyway, LONG TANGENT ASIDE. This is how Yrissia got into this rough state, because he was experimented on heavily. He was subjected to a bunch of cruelty and attempts to manipulate his soul. He saw many of the people he was supposed to protect die, saw his culture wither away and his language change until it was only an echo of what he knew... and of course, he saw his family suffer and die, as well. Perhaps the worst part was that he never knew of his sibling's possession. For all he knew, it was all his brother doing this to all of them.
Morscien eventually had a breakthrough and invented an equalisation prototype. Equalisation is basically his way of severing a guardian's connection with Ezirmir by replacing Ezirmir's essence with his own. This has a lot of consequences and did even more so back then when it was just a protoype. The first time he tested it, the guardian simply died but by the time it was Yrissia's turn, it worked well enough for him to not die. He did however suffer some memory loss and lost his ability to naturally interpret any language on Oleander, which guardians are usually capable off. That's also kind of because... well, once equalised, t hey aren't really 'guardians' anymore.
See, what it does, is that it doesn't just replace one god's touch with another's but it also severs a guardian's connection to their land and people. Many forget their names, especially at first because their name is another tie to their identity of being a guardian crafted for a specific group of people. It also makes them effectively immortal as long as Morscien's energy persists or until he allows them to die. It's rather devastating.
Yrissia continued to be a test subject afterwards for other experiments that had more to do with Morscien's interest in things such as bio-engineering, until he was forgotten in a cell.
A lot of the robotic features added onto his body were still relatively new and some weren't completed or failed and as he was trapped in darkness for years and years to come, more of them fell into disrepair.
It's obviously supposed to be mirror, showing that even if Morscien suffered and his imprisonment was originally unjust (which it was), he now is the exact same monster.
Eventually, the technology around his cell eroded as well and he was able to flee, with barely any strength left at all. Him managing to escape not only his cell but the Everlasting Winter as a whole, was a miracle that was aided by the lucky coincidence that Morscien was being visited and occupied by a demigod but that's a whole other story.
Anyway, he managed to escape, found himself something that would serve him as a raft and eventually washed ashore further south, where he was found and taken care of. He got to recover both physically and mentally and eventually was about to return to the north, to unite with a small group of his family's original people who had managed to elude Morscien all those years ago :)
