Chapter 14.1:The White Chamber
The stone was too clean.
It gleamed beneath her bare feet—cold, but not cruel. Untouched. As if it had never known dirt, or death, or time. The room arced into a dome high above her, seamless and echoless, bathed in flickering orange light.
No windows.
No doors.
Only torches set into slits along the walls. The flames didn't flicker—they whispered. They cast shadows that crawled upward and clung to the ceiling like vines. The light here didn't obey.
Kaelith didn't know how she'd arrived.
But her body remembered.
Children knelt in a ring around her, draped in pale linen robes that brushed the floor. Their faces tilted down—hidden by hair, or shadow, or choice. Not a breath. Not a tremor.
Stillness like a held breath.
She looked down.
Same robe.
Same bare skin.
Same chill crawling over her spine like something ancient remembering her.
Don't speak, something behind her heart whispered.
The silence was sacred.
She tried to step back. Her knees locked.
Not bound. Not trapped.
Held in place by memory she didn't yet possess.
Then came the sound.
Not footsteps.
Fabric. Dragging.
A figure emerged from the far end of the chamber, robed in red. Their garment shimmered faintly, stitched with symbols she couldn't read but somehow understood—glyphs of mouths, of suns split open, of teeth where there should've been eyes.
They carried no weapon.
Only a silver tray.
Upon it: a blade.
Delicate. Ceremonial.
Beautiful the way thorns are beautiful.
The figure reached the first child.
Paused.
A whisper.
The child lifted their face—blank, emptied, as if waiting to be filled.
The blade touched their forehead.
"Eshiel."
The metal didn't cut. But the skin marked anyway. A thin line of ash bloomed like breath over glass.
The child bowed.
Next.
"Yorra."
Then—
"Velth."
Each name etched like a prayer. Each child marked like scripture.
Kaelith's turn was last.
She felt it coming—like a tide crawling up the back of her throat.
The figure stopped in front of her.
Waited.
She didn't bow.
Didn't breathe.
The silence bloomed dense.
"What is your name?" the voice asked.
Not male.
Not female.
Just—other.
She tried to answer.
Her mouth refused.
"Speak."
She clenched her jaw.
She didn't know her name. Only that it wasn't theirs to give.
The blade lifted.
Paused.
Then descended.
Cold.
Then—heat.
A whisper:
"Ashema."
The name struck the air like a bell.
The children didn't move.
But Kaelith screamed.
Not from pain.
But from the sound of the name fitting.
From knowing—
in her marrow, in her mouth, in her memory—
that it had always been hers.
And would never come off.