Nameless

  Neon exited the manor after Seren told her.

  She and Seren were greeted by the hall of light, the dead and artificial flowers, and flaming, living colors. As they walked into it, Nameless felt the scent of the Existence become ever so unbearable. Sounds of chanting, lamenting, and singing, crying for mercy and a call to arms, they passed her ears as if they were wind. Against the choir, Nameless sang back, humming to the melody that she had never heard. Her voice harmonized with it. Songs sang on the rubble, I called your name, though my voice was only muted.

  The thing bled the colors of the night. A hue not of nature, but Nameless was used to it and used to the pain that felt like her head being torn from the inside and folded a thousand times. The Starseeker, he who embroiders the velvet of night, is pure nonsense.

  “O, thee who light the dark nights, the ruler of the night velvet, I pray to thee…to return peace and take back thy calamity,” Seren said, hands crossed as her eyes closed, but there was something off to Nameless. Her fingers were loose, eyes not even fully closed as she whispered the words to herself.

  “Are all Starseeker’s devotees so slack in their belief?” Nameless asked as she stepped into the hall, leaving Seren behind.

  “I am not devoted to my boss,” Seren said, following Nameless and unsheathing the sword. The sound of the blade leaving the sheath echoed as if a violin was being tuned. Music to Nameless’ ears.

  “Oh? Then I guess I am self-employed.” Nameless said, stuttering on the word self-employed and saying it with a thick accent that she noticed no one was speaking.

  “Didn’t know you knew that word.”

  “Didn’t ask the Euthians to re-invent the word Yellians had used for centuries,” she said, letting the power of her seal out. The air vibrated, a tone of something beyond ears and eyes. To be felt through the instinct of survival.

  “Who could not envy your power, Rosemary?”

  And so the summons from Nameless’ deep, unuttered, and unconscious dreams crawled out of the gaps of nothing. Her creations or summons- Nameless couldn’t even tell herself what they were exactly- formed into the shapes of things melting and dripping, limbs either of dead, mundane things or utterly disproportionate and slim. They groaned with voices- the ones of not mundane living things.

  “Are you more god than human, or less human than human?”

  Nameless took a deep breath, feeling the scent of that Existence, feeling the complex circuits of its seal and rituals. The scent and waves of the seal flowed through her. Nameless remembered the wind that blew on the ruins of Yel. It was almost the same, cold, filled with the rotting smell of the Existences. She was not gifted with the sensitivity of the Realm like Suiming and Fosfor have, but through time, she learned to do it. The heat of the blue flames scorched her summons and creations as she felt the smell of burnt hair, the flasks and books molten like cheese as they crawled forward with Nameless’ steps toward the thing of masks.

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  She had forgotten the anger she had toward Existences, when she laid her eyes upon that thing, her heart was nothing but an empty mirror. Nameless thought she was supposed to have some kind of emotion toward that thing, perhaps fear, perhaps anger.

  As she walked to the thing that used to be a part of an Existence, she caught a flow in the energy and enigma that passed through her. It was something she was familiar with. Too familiar.

  “Letter-Writer, your flame, how far they burn?”

  “The tears, the sorrow of Euth is fleeting,” Nameless added as she made her creations into a circle around the mass of masks. Right as it was surrounded, the idle thing started to tremble. Trembling like a slug poked by a stick.

  The thing rumbled as the chanting and choir sang louder in her head. A thousand in from a thousand time periods, echoing within that thing until the tears flew out from the ritual. Tears of sorrow, pain, joy, and regret flowed like a river through the broken ritual, the broken seal.

  Strange…a ritual this complex shouldn’t be destroyed so easily…unless it borrowed the power from something…

  Nameless commanded her creations to close into the thing. Their surreal shapes and disproportionate limbs approached it. The thing, blind and mindless, only trembled harder within the bounds of Nameless’ power, unable to move and resist.

  As it squirmed like a fish in a net, the flame of Seren’s fire burned high, the warmth not scorching, but warm. A warmth of tears rolling down one’s eyes and dripping into the soil.

  Nameless was fascinated by the flame, not for its power, but for its gentleness. Something her power lacks. The flame burnt into the ritual, Nameless could feel the sorrow of that flame entering the circuit and reconnecting it. She could feel the coolness of that throne built on tears, whisking her face as she felt an urgency to cry. As the flame dimmed, the seal was complete again, and shards of light flew back into the glass roof as that thing slowly disappeared. Fading like the morning stars. Its blood splattered the hall.

  “Letter-Writer. My work here is done,” Nameless said carelessly as she slowly retracted her power, the beings she created faded into bubbles unseen and carried away by the wind. She walked out of the hall, ignoring Thyme and the man beside him.

  “Rosemary.”

  “Can true names be found again?” the man said in Treisaulian. Perfect pronunciation and accent. The Treisaulian she remembered, with its complicated conjunctions and grammar.

  Nameless stopped. Chills ran up her spine as her hand trembled without her noticing it. True name, something she sold in order to be here. Nameless clenched her fist, swallowed, and replied as she wondered for the reason why she felt that chill.

  “True names are lost and can never be found again. It is the law, perhaps not even Existences can bend.”

  “Besides, it was only a sorrowful happiness that burned shortly. I do not remember it and will never do,” Nameless added, cracking her fingers as she looked to Seren, who was flipping and turning the azure sword around.

  “…Ah… so not even you have an answer…”

  “Fine…but I do know where to find a new weapon for you. I understand the feeling when you unleash that power of yours.”

  “Why should I trust you? When the world strode for a thousand years, yet I idled?” Nameless questioned while she pulled up her sleeve. Revealing the complex, dense circuit of the seal, the flowing pact that she made thousands of years ago.

  “You will believe me when you see the crown, Nameless, you will find it.”

  Nameless looked toward the man again, trying to feel what scent he carried, but she felt only vague feelings, like yarn that was only messier after attempting to untie it. The seal stayed silent while the tattoo-like patterns on it moved.

  “I will pretend I didn’t see you, Canvas, next time you and your son will be arrested,” Seren interrupted as she leaned onto a wall.

  “Ten-thousand times a thank you from me.”