Chapter 6: A Name the Church Forgot
The letter was sealed in blood.
Calen didn't mean to do it — his hand had simply cracked from the pressure, and when the ink ran dry, the wound fed the final words:
"He walks without shadow.
He speaks without breath.
And the lilies bloom where no roots should grow."
He sent the letter by hawk, bound for the capital, then sat in the corner of the ruined chapel, clutching his staff.
He didn't pray.
He couldn't.
There were no gods who would listen — not anymore.
That night, the boy appeared again.
No one saw him enter the chapel, but he was there, standing beside the broken altar, gazing up at what was once a golden sun carved into the stone wall.
Now it was cracked. Crumbling.
Just like the faith it represented.
Calen didn't speak. He couldn't.
But the boy did.
"This temple was built for someone else," he said, voice as light as breath. "Someone who was never listening."
He stepped forward, dragging his fingers across the dust-covered altar. A thin line of ash followed behind his touch — quiet, deliberate.
"But you're listening now, aren't you, priest?"
Calen stood slowly, back against the wall.
"I know what you are," he whispered.
The boy turned to face him.
"No," he said calmly. "You think you know."
For a moment, the chapel grew colder. Not from wind — from weight. From something older than the gods Calen had ever served.
"There are names not written in your scrolls," the boy continued. "Languages too deep for your tongue. The one who made me is watching now."
The candles — long-dead — all lit at once.
Red.
Calen dropped to his knees.
"What do you want from us?"
The boy stared down at him with a quiet look. Not pity. Not cruelty.
Just knowing.
"I am not here to take," he said. "I am here to prepare."
"Prepare for what?"
The boy didn't answer.
Instead, he walked past Calen and out of the chapel.
The lilies bloomed behind him, glowing in silence — but no one mentioned them this time.
They had already stopped asking why.
Outside, the townsfolk had begun to whisper a new name.
Not the White-Eyed Child.
Not the Godling.
But a word that hadn't been spoken in five hundred years — a name that appeared only once in the forbidden texts kept in vaults under the capital:
"Veyr."
And somewhere far above, you heard it.
And you smiled.