A name…
A name is the quiet key that unlocks a person's place in the world.
Long before choices are made, it is spoken, remembered, and carried by others, shaping the way a life is entered and understood.
In tales told throughout existence, a name is never just a word, it is the first truth spoken about its wielder, a mark left on the soul before any action is taken. It carries history before the story begins and meaning long after the moment has passed, gathering memory, expectation, and fate into a single sound.
Before the wielder acts, speaks, or chooses, their name is already known. It shapes how the world calls to them and how they learn to answer.
Small though it may seem, a name holds great weight, following its bearer through shadow and light, collecting moments until it becomes more than just a sound. It becomes a vessel for love, fear, and hope, a thread tying the past to the present, a promise that this life will matter.
To be named is to be seen, akin to existing beyond silence.
To name someone is not just to identify them, but to give them a beginning, to draw them out of nothingness and into meaning.
Long after actions fade, when stories blur and voices fall quiet, the name remains, an echo of existence, holding the weight of who they were, what they became, and the legacy they leave behind.
And yet… there was one…
A soul that wandered through the world untouched by any such power.
Their presence a question the world has yet to answer...
"She" is this pitiful soul.
A girl without a name, slipping through memory and story like a shadow.
As if existence itself refused to acknowledge her…
Long as she could remember, the world had never seen her, not truly.
The wind carried names of soldiers and nobles alike, shouted across the walls of the fortress she grew up in, etched into the stones by banners and blood alike.
But none of it had ever been hers.
She had no place to call her own, no family to utter her name with warmth, no voice to carry it forward.
Her life was measured in pain and labor, each day a trial that would have broken anyone else.
Having reached the age of fifteen, she had spent every hour bending to the demands of the fortress, hauling stones, carrying water, sharpening weapons, and patching the walls, but the work was only part of her suffering.
She was tortured beyond any humane reason, more than any child or adult could endure.
Her face, marred by what others called hideous…
The left half of her face.. scarred, ripped and torn beyond belief.
Such was the result due to the carelessness of a young noble knight leaving his guard dogs unattended.
The dogs had torn into the young girl's abdomen, legs and tragically, her face.
She had not the energy to resist such viciousness and as a cruel reward for her weakness, she had been mauled savagely and had also lost her left eye in the process.
Although to the dogs' defense, the girl was never one to be called anything above average in looks even before they had attacked her..
Her unnatural new features made her the target of cruelty beyond reason. She was mocked, beaten, and barked at daily.
Hands scarred by ropes and whip, back blackened by blows, she bore the weight of ridicule and punishment that no human should survive.
The fortress itself was both prison and stage for her torment.
Towers that rose proudly into the sky loomed like watchful judges.
Corridors echoed with laughter and jeers, the cruel games of soldiers and nobles alike.
Each step she took, each task completed, brought more pain, more whispers, more reminders that she existed only to suffer.
—-
Barely having reached the young age of fifteen, she had quietly resented her oppressors for the miserable and shitty life they had forced upon her.
Every day blurred into the next beneath the shadow of unending war.
The fortress was never silent. Even in the dead of night, the distant clash of steel, the rumble of siege engines, or the screams of wounded men bled through stone and sleep alike.
She learned early that rest was a luxury meant for those with names and titles.
As a child, she had been too small to carry weapons, so they gave her tasks no one wanted.
Clearing blood from the walls before it could stain the stone.
Carrying broken arrows back from the battlements.
Dragging the bodies of the fallen, sometimes still warm, away from the gates before morale could deteriorate.
When enemies breached the outer defenses, slaves like her were sent first.
Not to fight... but to delay.
To fill trenches, to carry supplies through arrow fire, to serve as obstacles where soldiers would not.
She learned to keep her head low, her movements small, her breathing shallow.
Fear became a constant companion, pressed against her chest like a second heart.
Hunger was permanent. Cold was merciless. Pain was routine.
Punishment came not just for mistakes.
But for existing.
For being slow.
For being ugly.
For reminding others of things they wished not to see.
And through it all, she learned the cruelest lesson of the fortress…
That no scream was loud enough to matter, and no tear ever reached anyone worth pleading to.
Fifteen years passed not as memories, but as wounds.
And still, she lived. Albeit, miserably.
She endured. Even as she labored, her gaze drifted beyond the walls.
Beyond the enemy banners flapping in the distance.
Beyond the mountains that surrounded the fortress.
She wondered if there was a world that would not despise her.
That would see her as more than a broken, nameless girl.
A thought forbidden, perhaps, and yet it lingered stubbornly.
A spark of something that refused to die.
And in that spark, small and fragile as it was, lay a single truth she had never dared to voice.
That even in a world that had sought to erase her, that had beaten her, starved her, and mocked her very existence…
She was not yet broken.
Not entirely.
And though the world had given her nothing, she still had one thing left to call her own.
A thought.
A desire.
That maybe the chance would soon arrive for her.
A chance.. hidden, fleeting, but undeniable.
The next day.
The next moment.
Might belong to her.
And in that quiet, forbidden hope, the nameless girl's story began.