Cassie shuddered. Something shifted in her expression — shock, quickly suppressed, the look of someone who had just noticed they were being looked at in a way they hadn't expected.
Hermes ignored it and focused on her runes.
He was immediately overwhelmed.
This was nothing like reading a Memory. A Memory was a contained thing — a clay tablet with a finite number of runes arranged with deliberate intent. A person's soul was something else entirely. Vast and layered and alive, information folded into information folded into information, and he didn't even know where to begin looking for what he wanted. He knew what he was searching for. He had no idea where to find it.
He withdrew after a moment, blinking.
Hm.
How had he understood his own attributes so readily on the day of his Appraisal? Was it simply familiarity — his own soul being the one thing he had always inhabited and therefore the one thing he could navigate without a map? That seemed likely. A person always knew their own home better than any house they had merely visited.
Which meant he needed to look at many more souls before this became useful. He needed to learn the geography.
He turned the problem over.
His soul was foreign. The Spell had said so directly, and his Flaw was proof of it — things that had never tasted his kind drawn to him out of pure curiosity. But what did that actually mean in terms of what he could see and do? His soul came from a different world entirely. Different origin. Different history. Possibly a different fundamental composition.
Did that make it harder for him to read others?
Or just different?
And what would another person with Oculus Sapientiae see if they looked at him?
He looked again.
This time he didn't try to parse the whole of it. He let his focus go soft and waited, the way you waited for a shape to emerge from one of those hidden image puzzles — not searching, just allowing.
The noise didn't resolve itself. It remained vast and layered and incomprehensible, a depth of information his mind had no framework to process.
But something else happened.
Something rose.
Not from any particular place. Not carved into a corner of her soul or written along the edge of some internal structure. It came from everywhere simultaneously — the whole pattern of her distilled into a single impression that his Oculus Sapientiae rendered, automatically and without asking his permission, into something he could read.
A True Name.
And the moment his mind touched it, the meaning unfolded by itself.
Song of the Fallen.
Hermes went very still.
He turned it over carefully in his mind, examining it the way you examined something fragile and unfamiliar. It was hers — entirely, fundamentally, irrevocably hers — the deepest truth of what Cassia was, expressed in the only language his attribute knew how to speak.
Was she hiding it like he had hidden his?
No. She simply didn't know. That much was obvious. Nobody who knew their own True Name carried themselves the way Cassie did.
Still, he would ask her to confirm.
Everything only starts to exist after it is given a name. True Names held power over things. The Sorcery of Names was the oldest magic in existence, the foundation everything else was built upon.
He had a person's True Name.
He turned the implications over slowly, the way he turned rune combinations over before committing to a spell.
A True Name wasn't just an identity. It was a connection. A direct line to the fundamental nature of a thing — to what it actually was beneath every layer of flesh and circumstance and pretence. If runes were a language for encoding True Names into workable constructs, then a True Name itself was the raw material. The most powerful possible anchor point for any working.
Which meant —
Oh.
Oh, that's interesting.
He could establish a connection to someone's soul through their True Name. Not a physical connection. Something deeper than that. Something that bypassed armour and essence and every defensive Memory a person carried, the same way Jet's ability bypassed physical protection entirely — except this wouldn't require proximity or combat. He could do it from a distance. He could do it without the other person ever knowing it had been done.
And once the connection was established —
Runes like Luck. Chance. Uncertainty. Success.
He had been thinking about probability manipulation since he first read the rune dictionary. A spell that tilted the odds. He had imagined it as something he cast on himself or on a weapon. But cast through a True Name connection, directed outward —
Bad luck. Persistent, inexplicable, devastating bad luck. The kind that looked like coincidence until the coincidences stopped being survivable.
No blood. No confrontation. No evidence.
Hermes sat in a sorcery classroom in a nuclear bunker academy and looked at his own hands and thought about what he had just figured out.
I am not going to use this on Cassie, he thought clearly. Obviously. She has done nothing to me and she is not my enemy.
But.
Later, he told himself. Not now.
"Are you alright?" Cassie asked hesitantly.
He realised he had been silent for slightly too long.
"Fine," he said pleasantly. "Just thinking."
She looked at him with her sightless eyes and said nothing.
She knows something happened, he thought.
Is she going to pretend nothing happened?
Apparently yes, he decided, watching her settle back into stillness. Good.
It didn't matter to him now, really. It was bound to happen eventually. But then again — his recent theory about using True Names to curse others meant that others could, in theory, do the same to him. He would hide it then. Forever. It wasn't like someone could compel him to say it out loud like Sunless.
Besides, Song of the Fallen had always been hers. The Spell simply hadn't told her yet. It existed in her soul the way Aspects existed in people before their First Nightmare — always there, waiting, real whether acknowledged or not.
"So… are we friends then?" Hermes asked.
"Uh — yeah. Friends," Cassie replied in a shaky voice.
Oi, you're making it sound like I'm forcing you to say that.
Finally, the sorcery teacher arrived.