The rain just stopped, but the world itself still gave out scents of wet iron and old pine.
Uzo Melbourne while watching the fog roll over like a living thing. Each breath tasted of damp earth and regret.
The bells from Eins Kingdom rung faintly in the distance sluggish and patient, almost mournful. He wondered if they still tolled his name, or if time had finally forgotten him too.
He covered his head with hood as usual as a habit not fear. You learn to hide even when no one's looking, especially when the world has decided you don't belong in its stories.
Once, Uzo had belonged to the House of mystery, a scholar, a prodigy, a man who could hear the truth behind every lie. But that was before the accident, before the spell that burned a friend into ash and erased his True Name from the Lexicon. Now, no record of him remained.
No name, no title, no power just me Uzo, a word the world refused to acknowledge.
At the edge of the road stood an old milestone. Three words were carved into the stone, worn by centuries of rain and scratches:
SPEAK, AND PAY.
He robbed his palm over the letters. They were cold, deep, and certain like a promise you wish you'd never made.
Uzo almost laughed. "Still charging interest, are you?"
He muttered with sadness, the wind sighed through the reeds, like it did understood him.
In a world where every name carried debt, silence was the only freedom.
But silence was extremely lonely and difficult to live with.
Some minutes later He heard a creak of wheels behind him. A cart appeared from the fog, pulled by a gray horse too old for speed. The driver a broad old man with hands like bark slowed down as he was passing.
"You lost, stranger?" the man asked.
Uzo smiled faintly. "Only by profession."
The driver chuckled. "Aren't we all lost?".
Then he urged the horse onward, disappearing into the mist. The sound faded, leaving Uzo alone again with the wet grass and the streams of his own thoughts.
From the ridge, he saw Eins Kingdom spread below him a city of spires and banners, split by the silver thread of a river.
Every House had its mark on the skyline: the red flame of the Witches, the black spiral of Mystery, the silver quill of Magic, the golden scales of Judgement.
Once, those banners had meant belonging but now, they were just debts fluttering in the wind.
Uzo reached into his coat and pulled out a small leather book. The Lexicon Fragment His only keepsake from the old days.
The ink had bled, the corners curled, but the words still breathed faintly on the page as if the parchment itself remembered.
He opened to the first line which he never translated.
"Every name is a door. Knock only if you're ready to leave."
He closed the book gently, afraid even the motion might summon something he wasn't ready for.
A crow landed on the milestone behind him, shaking out its wings. Its eyes were black and knowing.
Uzo sighed. "You again. You always show up before trouble."
The bird cawed twice like it always did as if like laughter, or warning then flew away towards the city.
Uzo watched it vanish into the mist. His chest tightened, not with fear, but with a strange, familiar ache the sense that something was waiting for him down there in Eins. Something old. Something that remembered his name, even when didn't.
He slung his satchel over his shoulder and started down the hill. He breathed heavily, the air thick with that heavy silence before fate speaks.
Maybe, he thought, names aren't given. Maybe they're earned.
And if that were true then maybe, just maybe, he could earn his own.