"A name is not a title. It is the debt your blood owes the dead."
The crown did not rest easily.
It weighed more than steel and more than history. It carried the silence of the unburied and the breath of those who once wore it none of whom died peacefully.
Eryndor had not slept. Not since the Oathstone bled.
He stood at the edge of his chamber balcony in the Palace of Ash, above the still-smoldering rooftops of Caerthus. The morning light was silver, not gold brittle and unsure. A strange wind scraped over the stones, smelling faintly of soot and incense.
Below, the streets were quiet. Not because they honored their new king but because they watched. And they waited.
A bastard crowned is a wound reopened.
That's what the whispers would say.
He pressed his thumb over the mark on his palm the rune scorched there when the Oathstone rejected him. It hadn't healed. It pulsed faintly now, like a second heart under his skin.
His father had worn this crown with pride.
Eryndor wore it like a chain.
---
He did not summon the High Vowkeeper. She came anyway.
Lysael always came when the throne was unsettled.
Clad in her robe of ritual grey, she moved like wind over old parchment. Her face was pale, lined, yet her voice held the weight of ten generations.
"You haven't spoken your full name," she said.
He turned. "I don't know it."
"You know what they called you."
"A mistake. A war-born. A bastard."
"And yet," she replied softly, "you wear the crown."
Eryndor turned away. "It fits no better than my name."
---
Lysael led him to the Hall of Names, buried deep beneath the palace. It was a chamber where stone remembered more faithfully than men.
Along the walls, ancient slabs bore the engraved marks of kings long past. Not in letters, but in runes each name a story, a vow, a scar.
King Caer Ilyon, First Flamebearer.
Queen Thalira of the Binding.
Aeron of the Scalded Pact his father.
Beneath Aeron's name, the stone was split.
"Your father broke his vow," said Lysael. "He tried to bind a kingdom with fire, but he buried his son in smoke."
"I buried him," Eryndor replied, "with silence."
She handed him a dagger. The hilt bore the mark of the Oathcutters blades used not to kill, but to carve names into legacy.
"It must be you who writes your name," Lysael said. "Or the throne will never speak it."
Eryndor took the blade, but hesitated. "What if I write a lie?"
She met his eyes. "Then the stone will bleed."
---
That night, when the court lay silent and only the wind wandered the halls, he returned to the chamber.
Alone.
Before him stood a slab of untouched stone.
He stared at it, blade in hand, and whispered a name.
Not the one he was given.
Not the one the throne expected.
But the one forged in exile, in silence, in rage.
"I am Eryndor," he said. "Not of House Aeron. Not of the Flame Pact. I name myself by no blood, only by the wound I carry."
And he carved.
The rune burned as it cut.
One stroke. Two. A dozen.
The chamber groaned.
From the stone, a whisper bled into the air not words, but a feeling: pain, recognition, warning.
The stone cracked.
A thin thread of ash slithered out from the rune and fell onto his hand.
Eryndor did not flinch.
"If the throne is a prison," he whispered, "then let it cage the ghost of who I was."
—
Far beneath the palace, where the sun did not reach, Aelira heard a name she had never spoken.
Eryndor.
The guards had said little when the throne turned.
But she had felt the shift like a cold wind crawling through blood. The walls of her cell had trembled that night. The chains had grown heavier.
Now she sat in silence, her wrists bound by soul-iron, her thoughts wreathed in fire.
She remembered her mother's voice:
"Beware the Oathborn. Their names are knives."
She had seen kingdoms fall to those knives.
She had watched her own city burn.
"And now they crown a shadow," she whispered.
Aelira looked up, her gaze piercing through layers of stone.
"He will come," she said. "And when he does… I'll know the weakness in his vow."
She closed her eyes.
And began to pray.
Not to gods.
But to the fire.
---
Later that same night, Eryndor returned alone to the Throne of Wounds.
Its surface was still cracked from the Oathstone's judgment. Its breath was heavy, like something sleeping beneath it waiting.
He approached barefoot, as was custom for the broken.
"I have spoken my name," he said. "And I ask no favor."
The throne gave no reply.
He placed his marked hand on its armrest.
The stone turned warm.
Then hot.
Then unbearable.
Visions flashed behind his eyes not memories of his own, but echoes of those who came before:
A king torn apart by his own bloodline.
A queen who buried her name under a mountain of flame.
A prince who swallowed his tongue so his oath would never be broken.
And then
A child, standing before this very throne. Watching his father burn.
"I never wanted this," Eryndor whispered.
From within the stone, a voice answered.
"You were born of ash. And ash remembers."
---
Beyond the city, deep in the bone ridges of the Ashen Fields, the wind screamed.
At the edge of those blackened plains stood Thorne his cloak torn, his armor covered in soot and silence.
He gazed back toward Caerthus. Toward the palace. Toward the throne.
He had seen the signal. The crown had shifted.
The Bastard now rules.
And with him, a new fire had been lit.
But not all fire gives warmth.
Some only hungers.
—