SFX: hhhhhhhhh— (the breath of a starving city exhaling through broken glass)
The city wanted three True Names.
It was polite about it, at first.
Whispers curled from shattered windows like perfume.
Street signs rearranged themselves into pleading sentences.
Every droplet of reverse rain carried a different voice—some childish, some ancient, all starving.
Give.
Give.
Just one little name and the pain stops.
Rhaen walked with his knife held low and reversed—the way you hold a secret you intend to bury in someone's spine.
Seere drifted beside him, humming a lullaby that made the air bruise.
Asha took point, boots cracking the lying asphalt with every step, crimson cape fluttering like a fresh wound.
They headed toward the heart of the inverted city.
But the skyline—hanging beneath them like a chandelier of black glass—kept shifting, always keeping the tallest spire just out of reach.
A cathedral.
Or a mouth.
Asha broke the silence without turning.
"I've decided," she announced. "When this is over and only one of us gets to be god, I'm keeping both of you as pets. Chained to the throne with your own intestines. Romantic, right?"
Seere's laugh rippled like soft bells dragged across bone.
"How sentimental."
She added, "I was planning to hollow out your skulls and drink tea from you. We can compromise: you chain us, I sip from you. Fair?"
Rhaen didn't answer.
His eyes were bleeding.
Only a little—two thin red lines tracing down his cheeks like shy tears.
The Flaw had activated the moment Asha's words (pets, chained, romantic) had hit something soft and treacherous inside him.
He wiped the blood away and pretended he hadn't felt the sting.
Seere noticed anyway.
"Oh," she murmured, honeyed with delight. "Look. The assassin has a heart after all. How fragile."
"Shut up," he mumbled.
Asha glanced back, saw the blood, and her grin sharpened into something feral and fond.
"Aw. Did I make the pretty killer cry? Come here, I'll lick it off—"
SFX: KRNNNNNNK—
The street split open beneath them.
Not an attack.
A question.
A perfect circle of pavement folded downward—or upward; the city no longer cared—revealing a shaft descending into red darkness.
From it drifted a child's balloon, black and heart-shaped, bobbing against the reverse rain.
Tied to the string was a Polaroid.
It floated to eye level and waited.
The picture showed the three of them exactly as they were now:
Asha mid-stride, Seere smiling, Rhaen bleeding.
On the white border, written in fresh blood:
I already know two.
Give me the third and I'll let the rest of you leave.
Seere's smile thinned to a surgeon's edge.
"Clever little apocalypse," she explained. "It's tasting us through the covenant bond."
Asha snarled and slashed the photo in half.
The pieces re-formed instantly, smiling with her mouth.
"Touch me with prophecy again and I'll burn this whole dream down."
SFX: POP.
The balloon burst.
The shaft widened into a screaming throat.
They fell.
Not far—ten meters, maybe less.
They hit the floor of a subway station that had never existed in any sane world.
Mirrors lined the platform instead of tiles.
Each showed something different.
In one:
Rhaen, child-sized, throat cut, holding his sister's corpse.
In another:
Seere kneeling in a circle of swords, weeping blood that bloomed into white lotuses.
In a third:
Asha standing atop a mountain of burning angels, laughing, laughing, laughing.
And in the largest mirror—full-length, framed in children's teeth—the three of them knelt together in the future, throats bared, offering their True Names to something wearing the Nameless Monarch's broken crown.
The city finally spoke aloud, using a thousand stolen throats.
"Choose," it said gently.
"One True Name. Freely given. The other two may walk away.
The trial ends. You grow stronger.
Simple arithmetic."
Asha's knuckles whitened.
Seere tilted her head, almost tempted.
Rhaen stared at their future submission and felt that old assassin-calm settle in—clean, cold, surgical.
He stepped forward.
Both froze.
"Rain," Asha warned.
He ignored her.
Rhaen walked to the largest mirror.
Pressed his bleeding palm to the glass.
His reflection smiled back—a smile he had never worn.
"Listen carefully," he whispered, voice soft enough to cut diamonds. "I've killed people for knowing my favorite color. I've murdered bloodlines for learning how I take my coffee.
You think a True Name is the most dangerous thing I own?"
The mirror spider-webbed under his hand.
"My True Name is a graveyard. Every syllable is a corpse I put there.
Swallow it, and choke on seventeen lifetimes of quiet, precise atrocities."
Cracks widened.
Black blood seeped out.
"I'm not giving you my name.
I'm going to make you beg to forget it."
SFX: SHATTER—
The mirror exploded.
Silence punched outward.
Every mirror burst into shards suspended like frozen starlight.
The city screamed—one long, wet, childish wail of betrayal.
Gravity flipped.
The station inverted.
They were spat back onto the street.
New words carved themselves across the sky, burning hot and furious.
[Hidden Condition failed by defiance.]
[Penalty invoked.]
[The Weeping Hunger awakens early.]
The horizon folded.
Something rose from the center of the city—tall as a skyscraper, shaped like every mother who ever lost a child.
Its body made of reverse rain.
Its face a hole showing the void between stars.
[Greater Nightmare Creature – "The Mother of All Forgotten Names"
(Saint-Rank Threat, Sealed → Unsealing)]
[Time until full awakening: 33 minutes]
[New Objective: Kill it, or feed it three True Names before the rain stops.]
Asha started laughing—low, thrilled, the laugh of someone finally invited to the war she was born for.
Seere brushed a shard from her sleeve and smiled like a woman opening a love letter written in screams.
Rhaen wiped the blood from his eyes.
He was smiling too.
Thirty-three minutes.
Against a Saint-rank identity-eater.
With two beautiful monsters who would absolutely sell his soul for a front-row seat to the apocalypse.
He spun his knife, caught it by the tip.
"New plan," he announced. "We kill a god's widow before breakfast."
Seere dipped into a flawless curtsy.
Asha cracked her neck and strode toward the rising horror, singing the hymn she used when she burned her own goddess alive.
Rhaen followed, coat flapping like broken wings.
Behind them, the city began to cry harder than ever.
And for the first time since the night he died on that rooftop,
Rhaen val Asteria felt something dangerously close to alive.