The river wore the Blood Eclipse like a second skin. Red threaded the black surface, gathering the city's lights into torn coins that slid under the bridge arches and did not come back the same.
—Begin when ready.
—The river takes what is offered.
—Anchor III: Trade a name to the river.
—Hint: Names are loudest when they are given willingly.
Damien rested his forearms on the cold parapet. The stone had been handled by so many hands it kept a memory of warmth even in winter. Downstream, a ferryman poled a flat boat between piers, his pole knocking the current into rings that broke, traveled, and re-assembled as if trying out new shapes.
Selene stood a little back from the rail, watching the reflection of the tower they had left—a black tooth with a red vein in it. "You know what it wants."
"Yes." His breath fogged and drifted. "It wants something I can't take back."
"Names are currency and oath," she said. "If you give it yours, it will spend it." A glance. "If you give it a lie, it will spend you."
He slid his pack off one shoulder and set it against the balustrade. The shoulder straps still carried the ghostweight of old badges. A long time ago he had worn a real crest—a white crown split by a hairline crack—because he had believed in being seen. The admin purge had stripped the permissions but not the memories; he still had the coin they had handed him the day they went public, a sponsor's token with the crown stamped too clean on its face. He turned it with his thumb. The river took the light and gave it back as something else.
"Give it that," Selene said.
"It isn't my name."
"It is what you were called," she said. "But if you want the right exchange, give the word that will cost you."
He looked at the UI and the line where his identifier lived. Damien Nightfall had been a mask that fit too well; it had grown to feel like bone. Asher had always liked to say the handle made the man, as if letters could teach a spine what to do. He had chosen Nightfall because it felt like a promise. Now the river asked whether he meant to keep it.
He slid the crown coin back into his pack and closed the buckles.
Selene's head tilted, the nearest she came to surprise. "So you do mean to pay."
He set his palms on the stone. "If I'm hard to find, I have time to build. If he can call me by name, he'll always be early."
"Then don't let him."
A breeze came off the water, smelling of iron and pepper and wet rope. The far bank lifted its lamps in a polite row. Somewhere upriver, a procession bellsman tried a rhythm and found it worked against the eclipse, not with it. Damien breathed in to four, out to six, and let the Bellmark Veil rise in a thin curve that caught the breeze and made it a companion rather than an interruption.
"I give it willingly," he said, quiet, to the river and to himself. "My name is Damien Nightfall."
He let the name hang, and the river took it the way a clerk takes a paper—cool fingers, exact.
—Offer recorded.
—A name is weight. Do you mean to lose it?
—Confirm.
He closed his eyes once and opened them. "Confirm."
It wasn't a show. No trumpet. No shock. The UI made a small, precise change: the identifier above his head unstitched on the right and frayed away letter by letter until Damien stood alone with a thin mark beside it that no menu could click. On the parapet, the old stone that had been warmed by so many hands cooled a fraction, as if relieved of a small duty.
Something else changed that could not be screenshot. The air stopped recognizing him first. Then the space just around his shoulders. Then the habit other people had of letting their gazes catch on a nameplate and decide how to behave. He did not become invisible. He became un-labeled.
—Anchor III accepted.
—River-right granted.
—Skill unlocked: Nameless Wake.
—Effect: Line-of-sight scrying cannot fix; movement through crowds inherits current; traces in logs blur over time. Breath control improves carry.
The official UI tried to turn Nameless Wake into a bullet list and failed, the lines sliding off it like oil on rain. The thin handwriting wrote a final line under the others:
—A traded name returns in other mouths. Be ready for what they choose to call you.
Selene came to stand beside him, elbow almost touching his. "Try walking," she said.
They left the parapet for the river stairs. People moved between stalls with event lanterns held high; patrol routes crossed, unraveling and reweaving; a couple argued in a doorway about whether a blessing was worth a copper tonight. Where he would have been a point things had to go around, he was now something the space forgot to resist. The crowd lifted its weave for him and set it down again as if he had always been where he would be next.
A White Crown pair turned out from the shadow of a spice tent. The senior's eyes swept the square, lips moving as he fed sightings to a bead. The junior's gaze snagged on Selene—her cloak always drew attention—and slid past Damien as if he were a reflection in a window someone had already decided not to see.
The senior lifted a hand. "Ma'am," he said to Selene. "Event routes ahead are restricted. Please take Three-Steeple Lane."
"Of course," she said, pleasant as glass.
They walked through the space between bead and bead. Selene did not look at Damien. Her mouth turned a fraction at the corner, a technician watching a machine take a first clean breath.
On the far side of the square he felt the first tug: a scry lock trying to take purchase and finding water. Asher would be watching the maps with that patient attention he liked to wear, asking the bead for numbers and being told their averages had become a river. We have him…we had him…we have a corridor. Corridor into sea.
The whisper channel ticked.
White Crown has cut the lower vault stairs and posted a choir at Tower Nine. He wants the optics of restraint. He expects you to try the western tunnels. Don't. —S.
He breathed and let the veil hold the small pressure of the message without letting it dent the line of his pulse. "Which way, then?"
She nodded along the river walk, where the balustrade gave way to a railing and the stones grew older. "Under the water clock."
The water clock was a tourist thing, official lore. It kept slow time for people who liked to be steadied and reminded children that something in the city was predictable. It sat in a basin under a canopy of carved wood, a ring of channels feeding a central drum. On normal nights it made a small limpid sound, a cheerful counting.
Tonight it had forgotten how. The Eclipse had taught the basins to hum. The channels sounded like breath. The drum whispered as if embarrassed to be expected to perform under a red sky.
—Scaffold directive updated.
—Anchor IV: Raise a house where shadow eats the map.
The line wrote itself on the drum's wet skin, then vanished into the reflection. Damien glanced at Selene. "You have one of those?"
"A house?" She smiled, this time speaking the word as if it could be a secret or a weapon depending on who held it. "A place that stands where maps don't. Yes."
The river tugged again—two fingers this time, skillful and almost kind. The junior White Crown at the square's edge had realized the error in his eyes and turned with a frown, trying to make stubbornness into seeing. The senior reached for his bead.
Selene picked a copper token from a notch in the clock's rail and flicked it into the smallest basin. The basin swallowed it without a sound. "Don't run," she said. "Water doesn't run. It goes."
He went.
They took the lane behind the clock and let it deliver them to an older street where the stones rose in a shallow arch, leaving gutters like thin canals. The city remembered flood in its ankles and planned for more. Under the Eclipse, the gutters wore red threads like bracelets. He stepped into a current and felt the Nameless Wake catch, carrying his weight forward a half-pace at a time, the way a strong hand might guide someone in a crowd.
They turned twice, keeping to the places where the world had settled into habits: laundry lines, a crooked ladder that no one moved because it no longer belonged to anyone, a vendor's handbell hung on a nail for luck. The patrol noise behind them faded. Not far. Enough.
At the mouth of a covered alley, Selene stopped and put her fingers to the brick. The brick had been painted the color of midnight and then scraped to let the midnight show through. "Here," she said.
The wall did not open. It admitted a thought. The Bellmark Veil hummed against Damien's skin; the shadeglass pulsed; the crescent warmed. He let the three marks settle into one line and stepped where she stepped. The alley bent, then didn't. The map decided not to insist.
They came out into a courtyard the city had forgotten to claim—a square of packed earth with a fig tree and a broken cistern and a door that had never asked for a number. The fig leaves were glossy even under the eclipse. Somewhere over the roofline a cat tested a jump and found it possible.
Selene unrolled a strip of canvas from her pack and tied it to two hooks that should not have been there. The canvas bore no crest. When she finished the knot, it held itself like a roof. "Shadow," she said. "Map says there's a tannery here. There isn't. There never was. No one will force service at this address. The choir won't sing here unless you pay it to."
He ran his hand along the canvas. It felt like the idea of shade. "Raise a house," he said, almost to himself.
She watched him with a frankness that made courtesy unnecessary. "You'll need a banner. And a reason to hang it."
He looked down at his UI. Damien sat beside the thin sigil that meant no one had the right to name him for the moment. The handwriting wrote a patient line along the bottom.
—A house begins with a door.
—Choose who may walk through it.
He thought of Asher's voice speaking into beads and making streets obedient; of the leader in the tower making the small decision to leave; of the tournament skin at the foundry lowering his weapon because discipline did not have to mean cruelty. He thought of people who had followed him because he had asked them to look at numbers and trust the way a plan could become a bridge.
"Not a banner first," he said. "A door."
Selene nodded, satisfied for reasons she did not give. "Then choose your doorkeeper. I have a name."
A tread sounded on the far side of the wall. Not patrol. Familiar weight. Someone paused, as if deciding whether to knock on a door no one could see.
"Riven," Damien said, before Selene opened her mouth.
She raised a brow. "You're sure?"
"I'm sure now," he said, and let out a breath that made the veil settle like a cloak. "He never liked crowns."
On the bricks, where shadow ate the map, the outline of a door drew itself in slow chalk that wasn't chalk. The courtyard held its breath, as if a house could be born quiet. The city beyond went on being loud because cities must. Under the Blood Eclipse, the river flexed and unflexed, comfortable in its work.
Footsteps stopped just beyond the new line. A knuckle touched where wood might be, testing.
Damien reached for the handle that wasn't there yet—and felt it meet his hand.