Smoke rose over the village of Harrowfen. Not the thick black of war, but the pale, lazy kind—the kind that lingered long after the blood had cooled and the dying was done.
Caedren stood in silence at the edge of the ruin. Homes burned to their stone foundations. A well choked with ash. Symbols scrawled in red across shattered doors—chains. Always chains.
Behind him, Neris picked through the wreckage, sword drawn. Sorren knelt by a scorched cradle, his face unreadable.
"They were simple folk," he said at last. "Fishermen. Carvers. They barely knew Highrest existed."
Caedren said nothing. His eyes tracked a pattern on the ground: a trail of bootprints, wide apart, heavy—dragging.
"They were left alive long enough to run," he muttered. "So their screams could carry."
Later, in the half-fallen chapel outside the village, they found it.
A child, barely breathing, hidden beneath the altar, curled against the body of his mother. His eyes were wide, his voice hoarse, and he said only one thing:
"They asked us to say the name..."
Caedren knelt.
"Whose name?"
"The man without a crown."
The boy trembled. "We said it."
"And then?"
"They lit the sky."
That night, around the fire in Highrest, Caedren held the child's words in his mind like a shard of glass.
"They don't strike blindly," Neris said. "They're watching. Listening for who speaks your name."
"They want it to become poison," Voren added. "To make the mere mention of it dangerous."
Caedren stood slowly.
"Then we change the game."
They looked up.
"We give them a name they can't silence."
At dawn, he called the people again. From smith to scout, healer to herder.
"You know me as Caedren," he said. "Son of no dynasty. Heir to no throne."
He looked out over them, his voice steady as steel cooling in the wind.
"But the world must know more than that."
He raised his hand, revealing a mark—an old brand burned into his forearm. A forgotten sigil. The insignia of an old order that once served Kael himself.
"I am the last born of those who studied under Ivan, the sage who stood beside Kael after his defeat and vowed to forge peace where only ruin remained."
Murmurs spread. Some gasped. Others wept openly.
"I do not raise a kingdom. I raise memory. I do not offer allegiance. I offer freedom—freedom to speak a name without fear. Freedom to walk without chains."
He stepped down from the tower.
"So speak it, if you dare. Not in whisper. Not in fear."
And one by one, they did.
Caedren.
Louder.
Caedren!
Until the stones of Highrest rang, not with gold, not with command—but with the name of a man who asked nothing but memory and truth.
And miles away, in Vellmar's throne room, the Chainfather opened his eyes.
A drop of blood slid down his cheek.
The name had reached him.
And it had hurt.