The "Real" world had returned, but it was no longer a world I recognized. As the
Sovereign of the Record, I felt the shift in my own biology with every thrumming
beat of my heart. My hair, once the shimmering white of starlight, was now a
bottomless, light-drinking black, a river of midnight that seemed to absorb the
morning sun. But it was my skin that held the true weight of our victory. The
fine, silver script of the Names of the Ten Thousand was not static; the letters
moved beneath my ivory skin like schools of minnows in a clear pool, a constant,
shifting ledger of every soul I had saved from the Void, the Salt, and the
Glass.
I stood on the ramparts of the Obsidian Peak, my hands resting on the cold
granite. I didn't need magic to feel the mountain; I felt it through the names.
When a builder in the lower village struck a stone with a chisel, the name
Garret on my collarbone would tingle. When a mother in the Southern repatriation
