Names the Moon Forgot

Keiran didn't sleep.

Not really.

The body rested. The eyes closed. The limbs softened.

But his mind… floated.

Through lightless places where names had no form, only feeling. Memory burned there, not in clarity, but in echo—rippling out from a center he could never quite reach.

He heard voices, too.

Not loud.

Not even words.

But tones. Like the sounds names make just before they're spoken aloud.

When he opened his eyes, the candle was still lit.

And the room was quiet.

At first, he thought nothing had changed.

Then he saw the door.

There, scrawled into the wood—

A name.

Not carved. Not painted.

Written in chalk. Rough, broken, like it had been scratched from stone.

VAYNE ORRELL.

He froze.

The name was familiar.

But not his.

Or… not anymore.

And that was the problem.

Because it was his handwriting.

He stepped toward it slowly.

The script was jagged, uneven.

Like someone had written it with a trembling hand, in the dark, half-remembering how the letters were supposed to feel.

It wasn't fresh.

But it hadn't been there the night before.

He traced the letters once with his fingers.

And something inside him tightened.

Vayne.

That was the name they gave him in the docket. The one the Sentinel used. The one on the forged papers when he first woke in this life.

But he hadn't written it anywhere.

Not willingly.

Not until now.

Except…

He didn't remember writing this.

A knock at the door startled him.

Sharp. Controlled.

He didn't move.

The knock came again.

"Keiran?"

A voice.

Low. Familiar.

Merin.

Keiran opened the door slowly, keeping his body between the Councilor's eyes and the chalked name.

Merin stepped inside without invitation.

His eyes scanned the room like a warden inspecting a failing ward.

"You felt it, didn't you?" he asked.

Keiran's voice was flat. "What?"

"The return."

"I retrieved a memory. One she gave up."

"Yes," Merin said, studying him closely. "And now the world is reacting."

"What do you mean?"

Merin walked to the center of the room, eyes narrowed.

"The moons shifted by less than a breath last night," he said. "Enough that the Vaults stirred. A glyph near the Archive Well cracked. And a Cleaver in the eastern cloisters forgot his own name mid-ritual."

"We are no longer in control of containment."

"You mean I'm destabilizing things," Keiran said bitterly.

"I mean you're remembering too fast. And it's not just affecting you."

Keiran said nothing.

Merin turned toward the door—and stopped.

His eyes locked on the chalked letters.

VAYNE ORRELL.

"You wrote that?" he asked.

Keiran hesitated.

"No. I don't… think I did."

Merin stepped closer, examining the stroke patterns, the pressure of the chalk.

"It's your hand. But the memory of writing it isn't stored in your mark."

"Then where is it stored?"

"Nowhere."

Merin straightened slowly.

"Which means we have a problem."

Keiran felt his mouth go dry.

"That name was a cover. A fake identity. Assigned by a Forger, then discarded."

"Yes," Merin said. "But now it's asserting itself."

He looked back at Keiran, eyes sharp.

"This isn't just about who you are now."

"This is about the versions of you that refuse to die."

Merin walked to the chalkboard Keiran rarely used, took a piece of fresh chalk, and began sketching something fast—his movements precise, controlled.

Within seconds, he had drawn a spiral rune.

Not Keiran's.

But something older.

A mirror.

"This is a recursion glyph," Merin said. "It traces mnemonic fragments that survived erasure."

"Put your hand on it."

Keiran obeyed.

The chalk shimmered faintly.

Then cracked.

Once.

Then again.

Then split clean down the center.

"You're tethered to more than one echo," Merin said grimly.

"Lys wasn't the only one who held you."

"You've left shadows behind in more than one life."

Keiran sat down slowly.

His head throbbed.

His hand brushed the chalk mark on the door again.

"Then what happens if they all start remembering at once?"

Merin didn't speak for a moment.

Then he knelt and placed a small stone on the ground—a Concordium echo-charm, used to detect unreconciled tethers.

It pulsed once.

Then turned black.

"Then the person you are," Merin said, standing—

"Will collapse under the weight of all the ones you were."

As he turned to leave, he looked once more at the door.

"Erase the name, if you can," he said. "But know this—"

"You didn't write it with your hand."

"You wrote it with something that still remembers being him."

Keiran closed the door behind him.

He didn't erase the chalk.

Not yet.

Instead, he sat by the candle and watched the flame flicker.

The name was still there.

Waiting.

Like a scar you only remember once someone calls it beautiful.