The Oracle's voice rang out—not through the chamber, but through Solan's bones.
No lips moved. No air passed. Yet the sound was there, etched into the marrow of his being.
"You carry a name that should not be."
Solan's breath caught. The Mask of the Forsaken Tongue pulsed, not with power but hesitation. Even it, ancient as it was, feared this place.
"I was summoned," he said carefully, though the words felt brittle in the air. "The Labyrinth pulled me here. I followed the signs."
The Oracle tilted her head. The chains across her mouth shimmered with spectral frost. Runes flickered across her blind face—alien, self-writing, recursive. One moment they resembled the First Language. The next, something much older.
"You seek meaning in echoes. But you carry silence deeper than most."
Her words pressed into his mind like the echo of a scream never voiced. He staggered, knees hitting cold stone. The Mask split his vision with blurred glyphs—half-spoken warnings, system runes, fragmented alerts he couldn't decipher.
Then—one line burned clear.
Reckoning Initiated: Trial of the Unspoken Names.
The room trembled. The crystal spire overhead cracked once—light spilling downward in a spiral—and the air turned heavy, sacred, final.
"You are the bearer of an unnamed destiny," said the Oracle. "To rise further, you must offer what was taken... and reclaim what you have forgotten."
Suddenly, the chamber unfurled like a blooming flower, its walls peeling back not into more stone—but into memory.
He stood in a different place.
He was young again.
Or at least, the memory wore his skin. A garden of wilted obsidian lilies rustled in the wind. Towering statues of veiled deities lined a path leading to a silver pool. It shimmered like liquid time.
At the center stood a child.
Him.
Solan—before the fall. Before the Mask. Before even the first time he bled a rune into his flesh.
The child was humming. Innocent, eyes alight with dreams. Unburdened by the system, by the Veil, by the chains he now wore in shadow.
And above him hung a name—blurred, forbidden, half-written in starlight.
He knew then.
This Reckoning would cost him the last trace of who he once was.
"Speak it," whispered the Oracle. Her voice was thunder without sound. "Dare to name yourself."
Solan stepped forward. The illusion twisted.
The child turned—and its face was empty. A hollow mask, smooth as bone, reflecting his adult self. It raised its hand, fingers made of light and black water.
Then it lunged.
Their battle was not of blade or spell. It was truth made war.
Every attack flayed away layers of Solan's mind—memories surfaced: his mother's death, his betrayal by the High Wardens, his first awakening beneath Eidralune. For each fragment he struck from the wraith-child, one of his own was torn away.
He bled recollection.
The Mask screamed. Wyrm shrieked. Even the system fractured—error runes flickered and reset. Nothing stable. Nothing real.
Still, he endured.
Solan caught the wraith's arm, forced it back. "I am the forgotten. The forsaken. The voice beneath the Veil."
The child-mask cracked.
"I am the echo and the blade."
A single glyph burned into the air between them—his True Name, not as it had once been, but as it was now.
The wraith shuddered. Its hollow face splintered. Then it fell into him, not vanquished but joined—a new chain forming, neither soul nor shadow, but something beyond.
The light dimmed. The memory fractured.
He stood once again in the Hollow Choir.
The Oracle bowed her head. The chains across her mouth clattered and fell away, link by silver link, vanishing into smoke.
"Your silence is no longer pure," she whispered, voice now her own. "You carry a Name that wounds the world."
Solan said nothing. His veins glowed faintly—new runes crawling across his skin. The Mask of the Forsaken Tongue had grown cold, as though silenced in awe.
And the system, quiet all this time, finally stirred with one line:
[True Name Awakened.]
[Authority Level: Ascension Tier I Unlocked.]
[New Trait Gained: Oracle-Bound.]
He didn't know what it meant. Not yet.
But he felt it—the change wasn't power alone. It was direction. He had stepped out of fate's current and carved a new course.
The Oracle smiled, her mouth now uncovered but lined with scars. "You are marked, Solan Maelvaran. Marked by the Labyrinth, the Choir, and the Nameless Core itself. Be wary. The world will begin to see you."
And without another word, she turned and walked into the darkness, vanishing like breath on glass.
Solan stood alone in the ruin.
For the first time, he did not fear the silence.
He understood it.
He was born from it.
And now, he bore its name.