Chapter 4: Beneath the Bones of Silence
The tunnels groaned as if the fortress itself resented their escape.
Every movement Uzo took felt like he was walking through someone else's nightmare the walls spoke faint names, fragments of souls that were never made it out.
The air was damping, thick with mold and regret.
Ronnie limped beside him, clutching a piece of metal she'd torn from her own chains, her breath came out ragged, uneven.
Every few seconds, she winced not from pain, but from the painful memory of hers.
"Keep walking," Uzo said quietly.
His voice was coarse, almost foreign to himself after days of silence.
"I'm not stopping," Ronnie replied, her tone half steel, half tremor.
"I'll die before they take me back."
From behind them, faint tremors rumbled soldiers shouting, boots hitting stone, runes sparking in the dark.
The Houses would not let them vanish easily. Especially the House of Mystery.
They rounded a corner and stumbled into a cavernous expanse, a forgotten sewer chamber older than the fortress itself.
The walls were marked with abandoned runic circles, words etched in languages that bled when light touched them.
"What is this place?" Ronnie asked, lowering her head to the markings.
"The silence beneath words,"
Uzo murmured, his eyes caught faint glimmers the air was alive here, trembling.
The Lexicon in his pocket pulsed softly, recognizing the runes like kin long forgotten.
Ronnie leaned against the wall, her body shaking.
"They called you a corrupter… But what the freaking heck are you really?"
Uzo didn't answer. Instead, he moved closer and closer to one of the runic circles.
It hummed soft at first, then deeper, as if it was connecting a pulse that struck something inside of him, he reached out his hands
The rune flared a shockwave which rippled through the chamber, forcing Ronnie back, the air shifted with ancient syllables.
"Námh-Los…"
The Forgotten Tongue.
Words of unmaking.
The tunnel lights broke. Shadows stretched not darkness, but absence.
In that instant, Uzo saw things he couldn't unsee:
Chains circled around from language itself.
Symbols that wrapped around every person, naming them, binding them.
He realized something terrifying he could see the Names.
Not just his own lack of one… but everyone's.
His knees hit the ground. The black wax glowed, its light glowing faintly.
"Uzo!" Ronnie shouted, reaching for him. "What's happening?"
"Names…" he breathed. "They… bind reality. The Houses… they don't protect them. They own them."
Before he could finish, a low whistle sliced the air.
A rune-engraved spear buried itself into the wall beside Ronnie's head, followed by another.
From the darkness stepped Taren Valencia's replacement, a young prodigy named Mara Zeth, another rising star of the House of Mystery.
Her hair shimmered like obsidian flame, her eyes ringed with faint sigils.
"So, the nameless one lives," she said, voice cold as frost.
"Taren's corpse hasn't even cooled and already you're walking free."
Uzo rose slowly, the black wax seal glowing faintly in his left hand.
Ronnie gritted her teeth, moving behind a broken pillar, her chain shard glinting in her palm.
Mara's smile was venomous.
"You have no True Name, you shouldn't even exist the world bends wrong around you. Let's fucking fix that."
She lifted her staff.
Runes bled into the air, thousands, forming a Word Array.
"Arts of Mystery ; Thousand Lies: Bind the world."
The runes launched like arrows.
Uzo moved, he didn't dodge he spoke.
The sound wasn't human. It was a broken word, fragmented, ancient
The air warped. The runes shattered mid-flight.
Ronnie shielded her ears; the sounds made blood stream from Mara's nose.
"What, what, what kind of magic is that?" Mara gasped.
"It's not magic," Uzo said, eyes faintly black again. "It's what comes before magic."
He blurred forward his hand brushed her staff. The runes etched into it died.
Mara countered, snapping a glyph with her other hand, calling forth chains of mirrored light.
Uzo ducked under, kicked off the wall, silence pulsed in his wake, and the world lagged behind.
Ronnie threw the chain piece, slicing through a glyph circle that was about to catch Uzo. It detonated in blue flame, shaking the cavern.
Uzo seized the moment.
His hand pressed against Mara's throat not choking, but naming.
"Silence answers silence."
The phrase struck her True Name directly the sigil above her heart flickered and went dark.
Mara collapsed, gasping. Her connection to the House broke for a brief heartbeat — long enough for her runes to lose control.
The explosion swallowed the chamber.
When the dust cleared, Uzo was on one knee, coughing blood. Ronnie dragged him up by the arm, half-crying, half-laughing.
"We're alive," she said faintly.
"We're actually alive."
Uzo glanced at the faint light filtering from a broken ceiling grate above.
"No," he said softly. "We're only remembered."
They climbed out together two ghosts rising from the bones of a forgotten cage.
But far above, in the spires of the House of Mystery, alarms began to ring.
The Nameless One had survived the Extractione.
And now, every House would want him either caged… or claimed or killed.