CHAPTER 7: SCARS YOU CAN'T SEE
They reached Branch 17 at dusk on the ninth day, half-frozen, half-dead, and entirely too quiet.
The gate guards took one look at the five of them; Torven limping on a cracked shin, Lysa's lips blue, Dren's left hand swollen twice its size, Selene staring at nothing, Kael carrying two packs plus the logbook and waved them through without the usual jokes.
The common room went still when they walked in. Conversations died mid-sentence. Someone dropped a mug; it rolled across the floor and nobody moved to pick it up.
Captain Rhen was waiting by the contract desk. She took the logbook from Kael's hand, flipped to the last page, read the single line about the name, and closed it like she was sealing a grave.
"Debrief in ten," she said. "Healer first. Then my office. All of you."
The guild healer, an old man named Corrick with fingers like willow roots worked in silence. He set Torven's shin, drained the poison from Dren's hand, stitched a flap of scalp back onto Lysa's head she hadn't even noticed was hanging. When he got to Kael he poked and prodded, frowned, poked again.
"No frostbite. No bruises. No nothing." Corrick's voice was papery. "You fall off the mountain or not?"
"I fell," Kael said. "Just not far."
Corrick gave him a look that said he wasn't paid enough for this and moved on.
Selene refused the cot. She sat on the floor in the corner, knees drawn up, rocking just enough to be noticeable.
Rhen's office smelled of lamp oil and old paper. She shut the door and leaned against it.
"Talk."
Torven started, halting, leaving out the worst parts. Lysa filled in the gaps with short, flat sentences. Dren said nothing; he just opened and closed his healed hand like he was testing if it still belonged to him.
Kael waited until they were done, then laid the facts bare: the circle of bodies, the eyes, the name that crawled inside your skull, the thing made of joints and hunger, the way it died and maybe didn't.
Rhen listened without moving. When he finished she opened a drawer, took out a black iron token the size of a coin, and set it on the desk.
"Classification just went from E+ to confirmed D-minimum," she said. "Incident report gets sealed and sent up-channel tonight. You're all off rotation until the inquisitor arrives."
Torven barked a laugh that turned into a cough. "Inquisitor? We're not heretics, Captain."
"You're witnesses to a Class-IV memetic entity," Rhen said. "Close enough."
She looked at Kael last, longest.
"You killed it."
"We killed it," Kael corrected.
"Don't piss on my boots, Varin. Four of you were puppets the second it spoke. You walked up and punched it in the face until it stopped moving. That's not a team effort. That's you."
She tapped the black token.
"Guild's giving you sole kill credit. Hazard pay tripled. Rank review bumped to priority. You'll probably test for D-minus within the month."
She paused, and for the first time her voice softened a fraction.
"You also just painted a target on your back the size of the Ironspine. Things like that... theydon't die alone. They have cousins. Friends. Worshippers. And now they know a human can make them bleed."
Kael felt the weight of it settle between his shoulder blades like a cold hand.
He nodded once.
Outside the office, the common room had filled with people pretending not to listen. When the five of them emerged, the pretending stopped.
Someone started clapping, slow and deliberate. Another joined. Then the whole room. Not cheers. Just acknowledgment. The sound you make when you've seen men walk through fire and come out the other side still walking.
Torven tried to wave it off and almost fell over.
Selene walked straight through the crowd, out the door, and kept walking. Nobody tried to stop her.
Later, when the lamps were low and most of the guild slept, Kael found her on the roof.
She sat on the edge, legs dangling over a three-story drop, staring at the moon like it owed her money.
He sat beside her without asking.
Minutes passed.
"I felt it die," she said finally, voice raw. "And I felt it leave a hole where it used to be. That hole has my shape now."
Kael didn't answer right away. He was learning that silence was sometimes the only honest thing you could give. Especially, when he had no idea what she just said means.
"I've healed broken bones, poison, demon rot," she went on. "Never felt anything crawl inside my head and try to wear me like a coat. I can still taste its name on my tongue when I close my eyes."
She turned to him. Moonlight carved hollows under her eyes.
"You didn't feel it the same way, did you?"
"No," he said. "I felt it try. Then I felt it fail."
"Because you're broken in a different place."
"Maybe."
Selene laughed once, short, ugly. "The guild thinks you're their new weapon. They're already writing songs about the Leech Warden who killed a name-eater with his bare hands. You hear them practicing downstairs?"
"I hear."
"They're wrong," she said. "You're not a weapon. You're a hole too. Just a different shape."
She stood up, brushed snow from her cloak.
"I'm leaving in the morning," she said. "Transfer request to the capital. Somewhere with walls and wards and people who know how to burn things out of your head."
Kael didn't try to stop her.
At the roof door she paused.
"Thank you for pulling me out of that courtyard," she said. "And I'm sorry I can't stay to watch what you become."
The door closed behind her.
Kael stayed on the roof until the snow soaked through his trousers and the cold, real cold... finally touched him again. Even then it was only a whisper.
He looked out over the sleeping town, the dark line of the Ironspine beyond, and felt the new weight settle deeper.
Stronger every day. Harder to kill every hour.
"That's a good thing... right?"
And now something out there knew his name the way he knew the taste of stirge blood and the exact sound a goblin neck makes when it breaks.
He pulled the black iron token from his pocket. It was warm, like it had been sitting near a fire.
On one side was stamped a simple glyph: an open mouth with no tongue.
He closed his fist around it until the edges cut.
Somewhere in the distance, something that had no eyes turned its head toward Branch 17 and listened.
Kael went inside.
Tomorrow the inquisitor would come. Tomorrow the guild would try to measure him again.
Tonight he sat by the dying hearth and started a new page in the notebook.
Under the heading NAME-EATER he wrote:
- Prefers spoken invitation
- Cold is a weapon, not environment
- Joints hyperextend 180°—strike rotation point first
- Dies messy when mouth is destroyed
- Remembers
He stared at the last word a long time.
Then he added another line beneath it, smaller, in the margin:
[Some things adapt back.]
He closed the book, banked the fire, and went to sleep.