Chapter 5: The Hound of Judgement
The morning light hit like an accusation.
Cold, white, and unwelcoming.
Uzo and Ronnie stumbled through a forest of dead pines, their clothes torn, blood dried black against their skin.
The fortress,The Cage of Extractione, was gone from sight, but its memory had clung to their bones.
Ronnie leaned against a tree, breathing heavily. "I can't, I can't, I can't feel my legs."
"You have to Ronnie," Uzo said quietly.
His voice was steady, though his hands trembled as he pressed a cloth against her bruised arm.
"Just take a deep breath."
She laughed weakly.
"Funny, You sound like someone who knows how to care." she said
"I don't," he said. "I'm just… you know trying to learn what doesn't hurt."
A wind swept through, bending the pines.
Something about it made both of them freeze.
No sound of birds, no insects.
Just… felt the weight of the world.
Then came the footsteps, slow, deliberate, too measured to belong to hunters or soldiers.
Ronnie's hand went for her piece again, holding it like a dagger;
"Uzo ooo...!! We're not alone."
Uzo turned, looking at the treeline and environment.
"I see no soldiers actually something worse."
From the shadows emerged a man clad in blackened armor marked with scales of silver.
On his chest, the emblem of a hanging
floating scale the mark of the House of Judgement.
He carried no sword at all, just a long staff carved with runes of finality.
"By the decree of the Eleven Houses," the man said, his tone neither cruel nor kind,
"you stand accused of the desecration of the Lexiconic Order, the murder of Taren Valencia, and the corruption of the Sacred Word."
Ronnie coughed and spat blood.
"And who the hell are you supposed to be?"
"Veras Cyn, Word Arbiter of the House of Judgement."
He tilted his head slightly, eyes faintly glowing.
"You, girl, are extremely irrelevant, the Nameless One is my concern."
Uzo stepped forward, exhausted but still unyielding.
"I owe your Houses nothing!!."
Veras smiled faintly.
"Exactly. That's why you shouldn't even exist in the first place."
Without warning, he struck the staff into the ground.
The forest fell silent.
A wave of white rippled out runes etched themselves into the bark of every tree, forming a massive containment sigil.
It wasn't light.
It was truth being forced into shape.
" Art of Judgement; Final Verse; Truth Makes Corpses!."
The trees groaned as invisible pressure pressed down on Uzo's chest.
His vision blurred; the runes tried to write his death.
Ronnie tried to move, but her body locked mid-motion, frozen inside a glyph.
"Uzo...!"
Her voice cracked into static, trapped between syllables.
Veras advanced, slow, calm, as though walking through time itself.
"You disrupt the balance," he said. "A name is a promise. You are just a lie."
Uzo clenched his jaw, forcing himself to stand.
Around him, words spiraled, fragments of runes, syllables from forgotten tongues that bent and cracked under his presence.
"I never asked to exist," Uzo faintly spoke.
"And yet you do," Veras said. "And existence without any form of meaning is sin."
The staff came down again,
The world split, literally.
Uzo's knees buckled, blood dripping from his nose as the runes began cutting into the air itself.
Then, through the storm of light, a single phrase pulsed in his mind, not spoken, remembered.
"Silence isn't absence. It's the truest of words."
The Lexicon inside his pocket burst open, pages flipping on their own.
From its pages rose a single rune black, formless, trembling like something alive. It clung to his wrist and burned cold.
The rune whispered a new power into being —
"Unword: Cancel!."
When Veras's next attack came, the entire sigil web, the very fabric of the spell, dissolved in an instant.
No counterspell, no clash. Just erasure.
Veras's eyes widened. "Impossible."
Uzo exhaled slowly, stepping through the ashes of broken runes.
"You shouldn't judge by words nor eyes. I exist between them."
He moved too fast for the Arbiter to track.
The air folded, and the sound disappeared again.
Veras blocked the first strike, barely — his staff splintered, the backlash sending him crashing into a pine trunk.
Ronnie staggered free from the fading glyphs.
"Finish that bastarddd!"
Uzo stood over Veras, silence thrumming like a heartbeat.
But Veras only smiled, blood on his teeth.
"You're no savior, Nameless. You're only the beginning of something worse."
He spoke a command his own True Name flared, burning across his armor and in a flash of white, his body disintegrated into scriptures, vanishing into the wind.
Ronnie collapsed against a rock, panting.
"Hope he's not gonna come back, won't he?"
Uzo nodded. "Maybe not him, But probably his kind."
He looked down at the black rune coiled around his hand. It had quieted, but not disappeared.
"What did you just do?" she asked softly.
Uzo stared at his palm the mark pulsing faintly. "I think I just erased… a word."
Silence fell again not peaceful, but heavy.
For the first time, Ronnie's expression shifted from fear to awe… and maybe a little fear again.
"Then this world's not yet ready for you," she said quietly.
Uzo glanced toward the horizon. In the distance, faint lights glimmered the spires of a city he didn't recognize.
"No," he said. "But it will have no choice but to learn."
They walked onward, two ghosts marked by silence and sin, beneath skies that seemed to speak their names even though only one of them truly had one.