It started as a whisper in a dream.
Not the kind that fades upon waking, the kind that stays behind your eyes, pulsing like a toothache in your mind. A name. One he didn't remember learning. Didn't remember saying. But there it was, scraping behind his tongue when he opened his mouth to speak the next day.
Tavrin.
He didn't say it aloud at first. He didn't mean to say it at all. But during morning rites, as the cultists chanted their muttered praises to the Hole and traced spirals in brine across their robes, the boy's voice cracked without warning. Not with a cry. Not with a cough.
With a name.
And not his.
The air in the prayer hall stopped moving.
Dozens of robed heads turned as one.
Ashur's eyes widened, not with fear, but with recognition. With something like regret.
The child beside the boy flinched as if struck. Across the chamber, one of the robed elders dropped their prayer stone. It shattered like glass, though it had been carved from salt.
The spiral above them, etched into the ceiling with patient, looping precision, bled a single drop of ink.
Then all at once, the silence collapsed into movement.
Hands seized him. Not Ashur's. Not gentle.
No questions.
No warning.
The boy was dragged down narrow halls, past rooms he didn't recognize and through doorways that hadn't existed yesterday. Stone blurred around him, twisted into a knot of corners and wrong-angled staircases. When they finally stopped, the world had changed.
They threw him into a circular room, low-ceilinged and wet-walled. A brazier hissed nearby, its flame pale and steady. Runes lined the floor, overlapping spirals like dead eyes watching inward. A single stone seat stood at the center, already slick with old brine.
Ashur entered last, slower than the others.
He said nothing.
One of the elders approached with a cup. Its surface shimmered in a way the boy's eyes couldn't follow. The air around it bent slightly, like heat on a summer road, but colder. Sharper.
"Open," said the elder.
The boy didn't.
The others moved to force his mouth open.
Ashur raised a hand. They stopped.
He stepped forward, knelt, and placed his hand on the boy's shoulder.
"If you don't drink this," he said softly, "they'll carve the name out of you instead."
The boy's fingers twitched.
His lips parted.
The cup touched them.
And the silence-brine slipped inside.
At first, nothing.
Then his tongue went numb.
Then his throat.
Then—
He felt his thoughts stagger.
Not stop. Not slow. Stagger. Like a sentence someone else had started and he was now forced to finish. But the grammar was all wrong. The punctuation missing.
He tried to remember who he was.
The answer came back in three parts.
None of them matched.
Ashur caught him as he fell.
The boy's body convulsed once, not violently, but like something had been unplugged. His eyes blinked out of sync. His mouth moved silently, shaping syllables that didn't exist.
"Tavrin," he thought.
But when he tried to think it again, it came out different.
"Tarvin."
Then—
"I never knew her name."
Ashur carried him back through the halls alone.
No one else would touch him now.
Not after speaking that name.
Back in his cell, the boy dreamed of a girl with eyes like breaking water. She was screaming. But her voice came from someone else's mouth.
His own.
And it wouldn't stop.