What Origin And Backstory Does Orpaz Have In The Manga Series?

Okay, in a more excited tone: Orpaz’s backstory is wild and emotionally messy. They start off as a war-orphan in the flooded outskirts of Narval, clutching a tiny shard of a black-blue crystal that hums when they cry. That shard is a remnant of the Voidwell and it accidentally bonds with them, granting nightmares and strange powers like seeing through lies and pulling shadows into forms. The Syndicate of Brass wants that shard because it can power weapons, and so Orpaz spends their early years running, learning to pick locks, and trusting nobody but a found-sister named Mira.

Plot-wise, the manga slowly reveals that Orpaz might be the last of the Starbound Line — a mythic family thought extinct — which complicates everything because it ties them to an old prophecy and an empire that’d rather erase history than accept it. I love how the panels drip tension: little childhood drawings, a lullaby, then sudden bursts of violence. It’s messy, heroic, and oddly tender, and you root for Orpaz even when they make boneheaded choices.

Short and punchy, I’ll say it like this: Orpaz begins as a stolen child fused with a piece of the Voidwell by wartime scientists, and that fusion is the source of both their strange powers and the enemies that hunt them. Raised among smugglers, they learn streetcraft and mistrust authority, but hints show they’re actually tied to an extinct celestial family that the empire erased. Key artifacts — a humming shard, a broken music box, and a rusted insignia — keep popping up as proof of that lineage.

What makes Orpaz compelling to me is how the story balances being hunted and wanting ordinary life; their moral choices feel earned. If you like characters who wrestle with identity and destiny while dodging bounty hunters, Orpaz is a character to follow closely.

My head immediately locked onto the thematic DNA of Orpaz’s origin: it’s crafted to interrogate personhood and legacy. In the later arcs, Orpaz is presented as a synthesis — part experimental construct from the Sundering labs, part heir to a celestial lineage known in myths as the Star-Mothers. The manga uses non-linear revelations: a present-tense interrogation scene, then an archival diary entry, then an origin montage in a single spread. That technique reframes how we interpret Orpaz’s childhood; what looks like cunning becomes survival, and what looks like destiny becomes a burden.

I took notes while reading: the Voidwell shard is the physical anchor for Orpaz’s identity crises; the symbol of the Broken Comet tattoo is a clue that links them to a disenfranchised clan; and recurring motifs — shattered mirrors, unfinished lullabies, a rusted music box — are all subtle breadcrumbs. Their backstory is less about simple revenge or chosen family tropes and more an exploration of culpability (who made Orpaz?) versus consent (who does Orpaz choose to be?). As the manga swings toward rebellion, those early scenes — the lab escape, the nights under market awnings, the whispered stories of the Star-Mothers — become emotionally resonant, turning a cool sci-fi origin into something genuinely mythic.

Honestly, the origin of Orpaz is exactly the kind of twisted, bittersweet origin story that made me fall in love with serialized manga worldbuilding. In the series, Orpaz is not born so much as wrenched into being — created in a subterranean lab beneath the ruined capital during the Sundering War. The scientists tried to fuse a shard of the Voidwell, an ancient tear in the sky, with a human infant to birth a vessel that could survive the void’s corruption. Orpaz survives, but at the cost of fragmented memory and a voice that sometimes feels like it belongs to another age.

Growing up, Orpaz was smuggled out by a smitten guard named Tavi and raised among traveling merchants who taught them to hide and hustle. That upbringing frames a lot of their behavior: street-smart, wary of authority, and fiercely protective of found family. The manga layers in flashbacks — a cracked lullaby, a scar that hums when the void stirs, and a faded insignia from a forgotten clan — so you slowly understand Orpaz’s dual nature as both victim and weapon. The emotional arc is powerful: they fight to reclaim agency from the very people who made them, and there’s a raw, aching scene in 'Chapter 18: Echoes of the Well' where Orpaz confronts the scientist who named them. I kept thinking about the tragic dignity of characters in 'Fullmetal Alchemist' and the haunting atmosphere of 'Made in Abyss', but Orpaz’s story stands on its own — equal parts mystery, moral questions about creation, and the hope that you can choose who you become, even after you’ve been engineered into someone else.