The city did not sleep that night. It pretended to.
Windows glowed faintly behind curtains that never moved, and doors were bolted so tightly the wood groaned with the strain. Somewhere beneath the streets, pipes knocked like nervous fingers, and the old stones whispered to one another in languages no one had taught Elira, yet she understood all the same. Names were being hidden. Memories folded inward, stitched shut.
They gathered in an abandoned counting house near the river, its high ceilings webbed with dust and old ledgers still stacked like forgotten prayers. Bren spread a map across the long table, holding it down with a knife whose blade had been ground thin from too much use. Kaelra stood watch at the door, arms crossed, while Miro perched upside-down on a beam, humming tunelessly.
"The curse isn't random anymore," Bren said. "It's selective."
Elira leaned over the map. Red marks dotted the districts they'd already passed through, forming a crooked spiral that tightened toward the city's heart. "It's avoiding places with strong records," she said. "Guild halls. Archives. Anywhere names are written more than once."
Maelin nodded grimly. "Which means it's hunting what can't defend itself."
Varrek shifted his weight, flexing the fingers that still ached from the river fight. "People who've been forgotten already."
The ash thread at Elira's wrist twitched, a sharp, warning pull. She froze.
"There," she said quietly, pointing to a blank space on the map—no mark, no label, no street name. Just empty parchment where something should have been. "That district… what was it called?"
No one answered.
Bren frowned. "It should be the Old Names Ward."
"Should be," Maelin echoed. His voice faltered. "But I can't… I can't remember it clearly."
Silence pressed in, heavy and uncomfortable.
Miro stopped humming. Slowly, carefully, he righted himself on the beam. "There's a name," he said. "I know there is. But every time I reach for it, it slides away. Like wet ink."
Elira's breath caught. The ash thread burned—not hot, but aching, like a scar remembering the wound that made it. "That's where it began," she whispered. "The first seamstress. The one whose name was erased instead of bound."
Kaelra's jaw tightened. "You've never spoken it."
"I can't," Elira said. "No one can. That was the price of sealing the curse the first time. The spell demanded a name greater than itself."
Varrek stared at her. "And you let it take someone's identity?"
Elira met his gaze, pain steady in her eyes. "I was a child. And she chose it."
The room felt smaller after that.
They moved at dawn.
The Old Names Ward—though none of them could say the words aloud—was colder than the rest of the city, even under full sun. Buildings leaned inward, their walls layered with faded signage, scratched-out names, and half-torn notices where ink had been deliberately smeared. The air tasted of dust and something metallic, like blood long dried.
"This place hates being remembered," Bren muttered.
They felt it before they saw it: a pressure behind the eyes, a tightening in the chest, a growing reluctance to think too hard about where they were or why. Elira forced herself forward, fingers clenched around the ash thread as it vibrated wildly.
Then the bells rang.
Not from towers—but from inside the streets themselves, a low tolling that vibrated through bone and stone alike. Shadows peeled away from walls, knitting together into a shape too large, too deliberate to be mistaken for coincidence.
The curse had grown.
It wore layers now—faces overlapping, voices murmuring in disharmony. But at its center was a hollow space, a wound shaped like a missing word.
"You came back," it said, every voice at once.
Elira stepped forward, heart pounding. "You're feeding on what was taken."
The thing shifted, amused. "I am finishing what was begun."
"What was her name?" Bren shouted.
The curse recoiled violently. The bells screamed.
Elira understood then—not as a thought, but as certainty. The curse could not be destroyed while the name remained unspoken. It was not hidden.
It was protected.
She closed her eyes, letting the ash thread guide her inward, past fear, past memory, into the space where names were born. And there—fragile, defiant, still alive—she felt it.
The name that refused to be spoken.
The name that would end everything.
And behind her, the city held its breath.
continue chapter ten A Name That Refuses to Be Spoken