He woke to the ghost of a fire in his chest. The burns from the slain Glaive's last act of defiance were a landscape of taut, angry skin, yet the pain was a dull, distant thrum. Healers, known only as the Tenders, had worked their grim magic, their skill not in comfort but in function, they were masters of pulling a broken tool back from the brink just long enough for it to be sent out to break again. He had been here plenty of times and sent many more others as well.
Strangely, the pain was soothed by a phantom warmth. A vague echo, salvaged from his victim's memories, remembered the searing power not as an attack, but as an extension of self. His own flesh, branded by this memory, seemed to accept the fire with a bizarre fondness.
The infirmary door opened, admitting Varien. The man's presence was a tangible weight, but today it seemed less oppressive. He stopped by the cot, his gaze assessing.
"The Tenders have cleared you." Varien's voice was in its usual gravelly timbre, but it lacked its customary edge. He placed a small, tin cup of cool water on the side table, a gesture so small and unnecessary it was almost jarring. "The Naming is in three hours. It is a dishonor to be late for the death of your old self."
The warning, he knew, was the closest thing to kindness Varien was capable of offering.
Varien's eyes met his. "You are aware that you may not use a mortal name until you have earned the rank of Terminus. A title is all a weapon requires." He turned to leave, pausing at the door. "Do not let what you did go to your head. You caught a master off guard. Commendable because it was skilled subversion and execution of course but still you are not his equal. Not yet."
The door clicked shut, leaving him in the silence. He pushed himself to sit up, the movement sending a fresh wave of pain through him. He closed his eyes, intending to center himself.
That was his mistake.
The moment his conscious thought receded, his Mark ignited. It wasn't a burn, but a detonation of cold light behind his eyes. The channel along his spine became a conduit for a torrential, unfiltered flood.
Knowledge.
It crashed into his mind, telling him what he now was. His Essence had a name: Unravelling Echoes. He could perceive fragments of echoes left on people and things, deconstruct them….
The knowledge was immediately followed by the proof. A thousand splintered thoughts, none his own assaulted him. Shadows of the dead Glaive's fighting style flitted through his mind, muscle memory that wasn't his own. He saw through the man's eyes the searing image of his own hand wreathed in white-hot flame, a tool of absolute power. Then came the echoes of the man's victims, a choir of screaming ghosts that had been silenced long ago, now given voice inside his skull.
It was too much. His mind, his self, was a fortress being overwhelmed, its walls cracking under the psychic siege.
And beneath the screaming, another pressure began to build. A weight. A formless, crushing dread that was beginning to coalesce into a shape, a word, a single, horrifying piece of knowledge that would be his eternal burden. His Penance. It was on the verge of revealing itself, a truth so terrible it would dwarf the chaos of the echoes—
His mind shattered.
A merciful wave of pure, silent darkness washed over him, extinguishing the screams, the fire, the knowledge. When the silence receded, he was left gasping on the cot, trembling.
The echoes were still there, but they were different now. No longer a raging torrent, they were fragmented, docile things in the back of his mind. Wisps of memory and shards of experience he could potentially access, but only with great effort. They were present, but muted.
But the other thing… the weight, the dread, the burgeoning knowledge of his Penance, the private torment every Marked carried, the debt for their awakening… it was gone. The darkness had not just silenced it; it had swallowed it whole. He could feel the space in his mind where that terrible truth should have been, a void that was somehow more terrifying than the revelation itself.
He had a power he barely understood, a legion of ghosts in his head, and a Penance he couldn't remember. He sat dazed for a while until he put himself together accepting his situation with cold practicality.
He was almost late. He moved with the stiff grace of the half-healed, arriving at the Naming Hall just as the final candidates took their places. The cavern was vast, dominated by the silent figure of the Master of the Forge, who sat upon a throne of unadorned basalt, his face a mask of shadows beneath a heavy cowl. He was ancient but radiated a coiled strength, watching over the proceedings with the profound detachment.
A senior instructor, a Glaive, stood before the assembly.
One by one, the survivors of the final Proving were called. A hulking youth whose mortal name was surrendered for the title the Savage Erebus. A whip-thin girl, fast as a blink, was also named along with three others.
Then the Glaive called out her name. The girl with the teardrop mark. He watched her, his eyes a complex film of memory, rivalry, and a shared, damnably intimate history. They were the last of their trio.
"You were Liana," the Glaive intoned. "Now, your sorrow is your shield, and your beauty is the bait in a trap of steel. You will be known as the Dolorous Woe."
She bowed, accepting the title that fit her like a shroud.
Finally, the Glaive's eyes found him.
"You were Evander." A name they kept in their records, but one he hardly recognized except in the depths of his consciousness, where the instructors would never look. The only string to who he was as an innocent boy.
The name felt like a relic from another man's life.
"Your silence belies your strength, scheming and madness, your deeds reek of calm calculation and your mark an anomaly, you will be known as the Quiescent Bedlam."
The title echoed in the cavernous silence. Quiescent Bedlam. He inclined his head, the motion stiff. His gaze drifted back to Liana to Dolorous, and for a moment, their eyes locked. It was not a look of hatred, nor of camaraderie. It was the silent, harrowing recognition of a fellow ghost, standing at the edge of a new and terrible existence.
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The marsh was alive with a symphony the Anvil had long forgotten: the drone of insects, the croak of frogs, the gentle blowing of wind through reeds. For the first time in a long while, Quiescent Bedlam was surrounded by life that did not want to kill him, and the novelty was a strange comfort. There were no animals near the Anvil. The beasts of the world, it seemed, knew a tomb when they saw one.
He was a day's hard gallop from the heart of the Forge, the furthest he'd ever been. His mission: hunt a Lore-Keeper and recover what he had stolen. Marked who had failed to become glaives were turned into other non combat tools for instance, Lore-Keepers were supposed to safeguard, update and maintain Forge records. The target wasn't a simple grunt; he was an archivist who had fled with forbidden texts.
He found the trail near a patch of disturbed mud. Kneeling, he pressed his gloved fingers to the edge of a boot print and let his Essence flow.
Unravelling Echoes.
The world dissolved. He felt the phantom weight of the man's foot, the panic that drove his stride. Faint, disembodied voices clawed at his focus, of his target, the Glaive he had made his first kill and others…He pulled his hand back with a wince, a familiar headache building behind his eyes. The echoes were a necessary pain, a tool he had been forced to master.
The memory of the training yard surfaced, raw and sharp. In the weeks after the Naming, he had been a chaotic force. The fragmented memories of the slain Glaive were a constant intrusion. During one brutal sparring session, his body had moved on its own, attempting a complex disarm the Glaive had known, but his own muscles weren't conditioned for it. The move failed, earning him a punishing blow to the ribs. He learned then that the echoes were not a gift, but a library of scorched books he had to learn to read.
Slowly, painstakingly, he began to integrate them. The Glaive's experience began to trickle in not as commands, but as intuition. He would instinctively know to parry at a steeper angle, or when to stop a roll half a second sooner to counter with the most momentum. This, combined with the new physicality brought about by the life force nurturing the body of a Marked who had claimed a kill, considering the vast amount that he'd absorbed from a quarter-circled Glaive, turned him into a more of a monster in combat than he already was. Soon, only the senior Glaives could spar with him at all.
He followed the echoes to the ruin: a crumbling stone scriptorium sinking into the mire. The entrance was a single, heavy door of cast-iron, swollen with rust and barred from within. He placed his palm flat against the cold, pitted iron, and another memory rose to meet the challenge.
He was back in the Quiet Room, a chamber designed to teach them the second half of their art: The Whispering Way. Their training in silence had not been about stealth, but about learning to listen to the primordial language of being, the Intent. A Glaive instructor stood before them.
"The universe was not created with a shout," the Glaive's voice echoed in his memory, "but with a Whisper. As a Speaker, you will use the life force from your Mark to suggest a new truth to the world."
He recalled the exercise: persuading a sealed, keyless lockbox to open only using his intent and the energy in his mark. He had been the first to finish with no one coming close, although he had spent days on the task, with the only guidance being given to the tune of "Stop trying to convince the lock to open. The lock has no interest in your effort. Simply, tell it the truth: its purpose is to open for the right key. Then, convince it that you have the right key"
In the present, staring at the large door, he checked for any signs of deafness dew coating- an inoculant. When smeared on an object, it severed that object's connection to intent and language. It didn't just deafen the object; it convinced it that language didn't exist. The dew imparted a single, overwhelming, and mundane "truth": "You are only what you are, and nothing more." Fortunately, the rare dew was nowhere to be found on the door.
He listened to its deep, stubborn Intent. Be strong. Be shut. Endure.
Were he a Great Orator or Sage like lore mentioned he could probably convince the door it did not exist and walk through it but instead as a Speaker he did what he could, drawing closer to the locking mechanism and inserting a piece of chipped wood he had picked up he whispered "Your purpose is to obey the key, the key bids you to unlock" A simple sentence that drained his mark of a little below half its energy which would only return with time and left his throat as parched as if he had been shouting.
With a groan of protesting metal that sounded like a sigh of relief, the great bar on the other side slid from its brackets and thudded to the floor.
Inside, the scriptorium was a wreck of rotted shelves and pulped books. The Lore-Keeper had been searching for something specific. A discarded page lay on the floor, its ink still fresh. It was a diagram of a Marked hand, the mark itself unfamiliar but surrounded by two circles, one thicker than the other.
The image triggered the final memory from his training. He was standing before Varien himself.
"Surrounding your Mark is its Halo," Varien had explained, his voice low and resonant. "It is a testament to your power and station. Those without a full circle are tools. A single, complete ring," he indicated his own wrist, "is the minimum required to be elevated from Glaive to Terminus. It is the first seal of true mastery." You were called what you were, First Circle, Second and the knowledge of further ranks was not told to them.
He remembered Varien speaking of the second, thicker ring, and the legends of a third level that transcended the first two greatly but was not described. The path was simple and brutal: kill, absorb, and control.
He pushed the memory aside, his focus returning to the hunt. The echoes of the deserter were strong here, laced with a new scent: the sterile, nullifying aroma of Atheos Dew. The man had found what he was looking for, and he was prepared for a fight where Whispers would fail.
Following the trail to a collapsed inner chamber, he found him. The Lore-Keeper was a gaunt, wild-eyed man, standing in the center of a hastily drawn circle, a heavy, iron-bound tome open before him.