Led by Vey's silent finger, Asher and Ira descend into a long-forgotten corner of Noxvallis. Beneath the city's foundations lies a hidden sanctum where names were once sacrificed for power. What they find there might change everything they know about the Blackwood legacy—and what Asher was meant to become.
Noxvallis – Edge of the Eastern Abyss
The city never admitted the east.
Even in old maps, it was shaded out—sometimes labeled with things like "UNSURVEYED" or "RUINED WARDS." But the truth was simpler and more deliberate:
It had been deleted.
Asher stood on the threshold of that forgotten zone now, Ira beside him, the child Vey held in her arms like a fragile lantern with no flame.
"This place…" Asher muttered. "I don't remember it."
"You were never meant to," Ira replied. "Neither was anyone."
The air thickened as they stepped over the old glyph-line, a boundary made from salt, bone, and oil—one that predated even the Mask Cult. The glyphs sparked as Vey passed, as if recognizing something far older than any spell.
And that's when the whispers began.
Not external, not auditory. But internal, buried in bone marrow and ancestral memory.
Kalon… Kalon… Kalon…
They descended into a stairwell chiseled into the bones of the earth—spiraling downward into an ancient complex of obsidian and root-veined stone. The place pulsed with something primal.
"I know this place," Ira whispered, almost in a trance. "My mother was brought here as a girl. Before she ran."
Asher stared at her, realization dawning.
"She was part of this?"
"No… used by it. Like the rest of the women chosen for 'Line Work.'" She traced a finger along the walls, pausing at a relief carving—a man with a crown of veins, his eyes gouged out.
"Kalon Blackwood," Asher said, voice dry.
The founder. The cursebearer. The one who traded names for dominion.
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Sanctum of the First Pact
They entered the heart chamber. Black stone. Three raised altars. A dome overhead lined with hanging tongue-shaped pendulums.
And at the center: a well of names.
It looked shallow—but when Asher stepped closer, he felt a gravity that threatened to pull his identity apart.
"Each name placed here," Ira murmured, "was stripped from its bearer. Turned into currency."
"And what did he buy with it?" Asher asked, even though he already knew.
Power.
Lineage.
Protection from the gods of the streets.
And something worse—a promise from something underneath all gods.
Vey stepped forward and placed his small palm on the edge of the well.
Suddenly, Asher's mind fractured—
[Vision Sequence: The Pact Remembered]
A younger Kalon kneeling before a pit of screaming names.
The figure offering him the deal is faceless, genderless, an amalgamation of belief and hunger.
"Speak no name," it whispers. "Take none. Give all."
And Kalon—desperate to protect his family from the fallout of the Divine Wars—agrees.
The cost: no Blackwood may truly know themselves.
Not entirely. Not ever.
Each generation inherits fragments—instincts, dreams, urges—but never truth.
Until one is born with no name at all. A reversal of the curse.
A boy who could bear the full truth because he had no false name to begin with.
Back in the Sanctum
Asher fell back, gasping.
"I was never meant to be Asher Blackwood," he whispered. "That name… it was assigned. A placeholder."
Ira's face went pale. "Then who are you?"
And in the silence, Vey spoke for the first time.
One word. Quiet, dry, cracked from disuse.
"Remnant."
The well flared.
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Noxvallis – Aboveground, Same Time
All across the city, people paused. Many clutched their throats. Others wept without understanding why.
In the gutters, gods stirred, feeling the pact shift.
The city's map shifted slightly. Alleyways shortened. Street names blinked out of existence and were replaced with feeling-signatures—an old divine language.
Noxvallis wasn't collapsing.
It was being rewritten.
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Back in the Sanctum
"The child," Ira said slowly, "isn't the key."
Asher turned.
"He's the mirror," she continued. "Showing us what was silenced."
"And I'm the voice that was never given," Asher added.
He stepped toward the well again, his hand shaking.
"I need to break the pact."
"But if you do," Ira said, "we don't know what comes next."
"I do," he whispered. "A world where names don't hurt."
End of Chapter 134
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Chapter 135 – "The Silence That Screamed"Asher makes the impossible decision to confront the Remnant pact directly. But what answers him is not Kalon. It is the true entity beneath the well—a being that feeds on denied truths. Noxvallis won't survive the scream that follows… unless someone answers it with a name that never existed.