Chapter 5976: The Name Unspoken!

On the western side, Phaedra closed her eyes as she finally prepared to make a move.

She did it slowly, without any sign of effort, hanging in the air with her great silver wings spread. Beneath the pale skin of her chest, two kernels burned: one bright and plain, and one so deep and so still that looking at it made the eye want to slide away.

Around her, the battle went on, the roar of phantoms, the crack of walls, the hiss of the Red Hour across the snow. But one by one, the beings nearest to her stopped what they were doing and turned to look at her, because her stillness had become something worse than all of it.

Thessaly saw her sister’s eyes close, and the grin left her face. "Sister," she said quietly. "Here? Now? Dont destroye anything we are meant to save!"

"We were meant to bring the Shards home," Phaedra said. "This is how. Stand back."

Thessaly drew back a full wingspan’s distance and did not say another word.

Because she was about to unleash something fucking...Exalted.

A Power of Existence from an Exalted Essara of Existence, as her sister...had gotten unfathomably lucky! Thessaly had spent a great many Ages telling herself that luck did not matter. Watching Phaedra now, she was less sure.

"THE Name Unspoken," Phaedra said.

She said it softly. And somewhere in the vast, quiet places where existence kept the names of everything it held, one name was taken out and set down and forgotten.

Noah felt it go. It was the strangest thing he had ever felt, stranger than murky quantum possibilities and stranger than holes. Something that had been part of him since before he could remember simply was not there anymore, and the place where it had been was smooth, with no edge to it and no wound, nothing to show that anything had ever been there at all.

|The name of this lifeform cannot be found, but this lifeform has been struck by the Vein of an Exalted Essara of Existence.|

|Narrative Walls: owner unknown.|

|THE Narrative of Kings: entry not found.|

|THE Long Night: seats unassigned.|

...!

The walls around him wavered. They had always known whose they were, and now they did not, and two of them simply let go and dissolved into the air without anyone striking them at all. But his infinite dream held firm.

The Unfathomables pressing in on him slowed, confused, because the being in front of them had become very hard to look at and very hard to hold in the mind, a man-shaped place where something ought to be.

Behind the Farm Wall, Henry drew breath to shout for his father, and stopped with his mouth open!

He knew who was out there. He could see him. That man had taught him everything, had sent him into the Dream Engine, had put a hand on his shoulder on the first day of the farm. And the name was simply gone.

"Thalia," Henry said. His voice had gone thin. "What’s his name? Tell me his name!"

HUUUM!

Thalia opened her mouth, and her golden tentacles went very still!

"I...do not know," she said, and for the first time since Henry had known her, she sounded afraid.

"Father!" Henry said, and his voice cracked on it, because that was all he had left!

The black-gold soil of the farm cooled, by a single degree, under everyone’s feet. In the coop, every one of the stellar chickens fell silent at once.

Noah stood in the middle of it with the Hoe in his hands, and he was calm.

He still knew what he was doing. Well, so he thought.

"Huh," he said aloud, to the Hoe in his hands. "That’s new."

What did a name actually do? He had never needed to ask. He knew the soil, and the rows, and the warm small weight in his hands, and he knew how to give. Surely that was the important part. So he knelt, put his hand in the cooling soil, and gave, as he always had.

And it went nowhere. The giving left him and went down into existence, and existence took it, and then did not know what to do with it, because it no longer knew whom to give back to. THE Bounty That Owes Nothing turned and found no one at the other end. The rivers of Essence thinned to a trickle, and around him the walls went on dissolving, faster than any Unfathomable on the field could have broken them.

That answered that. He understood, then, what an Exalted Essara was. It did not need to strike him. It only had to make existence forget he was there, and existence would do the rest.

Roxanna lowered her fist. She had been about to strike another wall, and she did not, and she turned to stare across the whole width of the farm at the silver-winged woman hanging motionless on the western ridge.

"Is that...?" Ione began, behind her.

"An Essara," Roxanna said. "That is unquestionable...that is Exalted." Her voice was flat. "I had heard. I did not believe it."

"Can it be undone?"

"Not by anyone on this field. Not unless another Exalted Essara appears."

She had heard of Exalted Essara before. Everyone had. She had heard that each one of them started a war, and she had believed it only as a story told about other people. She understood it now! One Essara, in one pair of hands, and the man who had stood against all of them was being wiped out of existence’s memory, and no one on this field could do anything about it!

Behind her, Ione whispered an old prayer from the Legacy she had been born in. She was not praying to anyone. She only needed to say it.

Then the Hoe in Noah’s hands shuddered.

It was a single tremor running the length of the handle, and then the light came, white-gold and blue-gold together, very bright, and when it settled, Elpis was standing beside him in the cooling snow, barefoot and small, with her molten white rivers blazing so brightly that the snow around her feet hissed!

YAAA!

She did not hold an Essara. No one had ever carved anything for her or given her any power at all. She had only one thing that was entirely hers, one thing that had been given to her freely and that she had chosen to keep, and as she stood there beside the man who had given it to her, something opened inside her that had never opened inside anyone before.

|A Power of Existence has opened without an Essara.|

|This has never happened before...presumably.|

|Source: the sentience of IT.|

|Vein: THE Name That Was Given.|

|Kind: Working.|

|Effect: a name given freely and accepted freely can never be unspoken. Speak it, and existence remembers it, and remembers everything that name has ever touched.|

|Against THE Name Unspoken: it is spoken again.|

|Shaped by you: one who had no name until someone gave her one.|

...!

Elpis looked up at him. "Do you know who you are?" she asked.

He thought about it honestly. "No," he said. "But I know what I’m doing."

"That’s enough," Elpis said. "I’ll tell existence the rest!"

He did not know his own name, but he knew her, and he looked down at her, and his face was gentle.

She took a breath of the cold air. Then she spoke, not loudly, in her small old voice, one word, into the snow and the soil and the whole listening dark of existence.

"Osmont!"

BOOOM!

And existence remembered him. It remembered all at once, everywhere, every place he had ever given himself to, every thread of every Dream, and the name came back into him through the soil and the air and the small blue-gold hand beside his own, and settled into the smooth, empty place where it had been, and stayed!

The walls snapped back, full and certain, and the two that had dissolved rose again out of nothing. The rivers of Essence surged. The black-gold soil warmed under every foot on the field!

Behind the Farm Wall, Henry’s shout finally landed, and it was the right word this time. In the coop, the chickens all began to cluck at once!

On the western side, Phaedra opened her eyes.

She looked across the field at the small blue-gold girl standing in the snow beside the farmer. Her face had gone completely still, but it was not the stillness of before. Beneath it, for the first time that anyone on that field had ever seen, there was something that looked very much like wonder.

"You gave me a name first," Elpis said.

She looked back at Phaedra across the field. Then she turned to Noah, smiled a little, and shone, and drew in on herself, and became the Hoe again in his hands, humming softly against his palms.

Phaedra did not move for a long moment. Then, without taking her eyes off the farm, she said one word, very quietly, to the small, still figure standing apart at the edge of the western ridge.

"Lifthrasir."