The price of a Name

The page felt alive in her hand.

Silver-veined parchment, torn from the very spine of fate's dominion. It quivered at Eloryn's touch—hungry to be filled, to become real. But she hesitated.

"Once I write my name," she said softly, "the Book will know me again. And so will the Inquisition."

Maren stood beside her, tense. "Then maybe don't. Maybe we keep moving. Use the shard, find the others—unwritten like you. Build something."

She looked at him. Not with defiance. With sorrow.

"I've lived like that already. A dozen lives. Always hiding. Always dying quietly in corners of history."

She turned her gaze back to the page.

"I need to give this name weight. Let it be more than a whisper."

She raised the silver-bone quill. The ink came not from a bottle, but from within—drawn from her blood, her memory, her soul. As she wrote, her hand trembled.

Eloryn of the Ninefold Line. Daughter of the Sea Oracle. Last of the Dreamwrights. Unwritten until now.

The words blazed into the page—and the air around them shifted.

The Hollow Spire moaned with a sound not heard in centuries. Lights flared from its walls. Runes aligned into a spiral that pointed… south.

Eloryn gasped. "It's showing me something. A location."

Maren's eyes widened. "Where?"

"The True Vault," she said. "Not the copy beneath the palace—not the mockery the Inquisition keeps. The original sanctuary. Where the first prophecies were spoken."

"And now the Book knows it too."

She nodded grimly. "We'll have to race them there."

Before they could react, the entire chamber shuddered.

A jagged crack split the floor beneath the statue of Kaelren. From the darkness below, a voice rose—not Kaelren's. Not human.

A name has been written, it hissed. The chain is awake. The gate begins to open.

"Eloryn…" Maren whispered. "What did you really awaken?"

But she already knew. Not just prophecy.

Not just memory.

She had stirred something older—something buried beneath the Book itself.

The Chain of Echoes.

A curse born of the first Oracle's betrayal. A being imprisoned to make the Book possible. A god broken into words.

And now, it knew her name.

She turned, quill still in hand, and whispered: "We need to run."

But she also knew… they wouldn't get far before it began hunting them.

Not unless she found the True Vault—and unbound the world from fate once and for all.

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