THE THIRTEENTH NAME - by Onlyreal

I learned too late that names are doors. In my world, magic is not spoken—it is remembered. To cast a spell, you must recall something that was once taken from you: a childhood face, a forgotten dream, the sound of your own laughter. The greater the magic, the greater the loss. That is the law the priests taught us. That is the lie we swallowed. I was very good at forgetting. By seventeen, I could no longer remember my mother’s voice. By twenty, I had erased the sensation of warmth. By the time they crowned me Archivist of the Black Reliquary, I had forgotten my own face. Mirrors showed me something pale and wrong, like a reflection lagging behind reality. Still, I served. The Reliquary lay beneath the cathedral, buried where the roots of the world rot. Its doors were sealed with bone and prayer. Inside were the Names—true names of gods, monsters, and things that had never been meant to breathe. Twelve names were known. Twelve names had been spoken in history. Each time, the world had changed in ways we pretended not to notice. Floods that remembered cities. Forests that screamed at night. Children born without shadows. The thirteenth name was forbidden. Naturally, that was the one they sent me to retrieve. ⸻ The descent took three days. Stairs spiraled into darkness that swallowed light like hunger. My torch dimmed the deeper I went, not from lack of fuel, but from fear. Even fire knew better than to shine there. I began to hear footsteps behind me. Not echoes.Timing was wrong. Too deliberate. I did not turn around. At the bottom, the Reliquary breathed. That is the only word for it. The walls expanded and contracted, stone flexing like muscle. Veins of gold pulsed beneath the surface, carrying something thick and luminous. Shelves rose from the floor, each bearing a skull etched with runes. The air tasted of rust and old prayers. At the center rested a pedestal of black glass. And on it—nothing. No scroll. No carving. No inscription. Just absence. I stepped closer, and the absence noticed me. My head split with pain. Memories surfaced violently, clawing their way back. I saw my childhood home, not as I remembered it, but as it truly was—rotting from the inside, walls whispering my name at night. I saw my mother standing over my bed, crying not because she loved me, but because she was afraid. Because she had been told what I was. “No,” I whispered, clutching my skull. The footsteps behind me stopped. A voice spoke from everywhere at once. “Archivist,” it said gently.“You have brought yourself home.” ⸻ The thirteenth name was not written because it could not be contained. It was me. Not my spoken name. Not the one my parents gave me in terror. But the name beneath that—the one etched into the structure of reality. The name that defined what I was for. I remembered then. I was not human. I was a vessel. A living lock designed to forget itself until the world needed to be undone. The priests knew. The cathedral was built around me, not above me. Every spell I cast, every memory I sacrificed, loosened the seal inside my bones. That was why forgetting came so easily. That was why magic answered me so eagerly. The footsteps approached. I turned. The thing behind me wore my face—no, not wore. Shared it. Like we were reflections caught between mirrors. Its eyes were pits of starlight, ancient and cruel. “There are twelve names already spoken,” it said.“Twelve wounds in the world. You are the thirteenth.” “What happens,” I asked, voice trembling, “when I’m spoken?” It smiled. “The gods wake up.” ⸻ I tried to run. The floor softened, swallowing my feet. Stone became flesh. Shelves screamed as skulls cracked open, spilling light that burned like revelation. My body began to change—skin thinning, veins glowing with the same gold as the walls. Memories poured out of me like blood. Every spell I had ever cast returned its cost. I felt my mother’s hands again. Warm. Loving. I felt sunlight. I felt laughter. I felt human—for the first and last time. It hurt more than any horror. “Please,” I begged the thing that was me. “Let me forget again.” It knelt before me, almost tender. “Forgetting was mercy,” it said.“But mercy is over.” It spoke the name. My name. ⸻ The world did not end. It remembered. Mountains bent like kneeling giants. Rivers flowed backward, dragging the dead with them. The sky split into layers, each revealing a god that had been sleeping beneath the next. They were vast, malformed, unfinished—creators who had abandoned their work and sealed themselves away out of shame. And I was the key they had built to wake themselves. My body unraveled into symbols and light. I felt myself everywhere—inside storms, inside screams, inside the silence between heartbeats. The cathedral collapsed inward, folding around the Reliquary like a coffin. I understood then the final cruelty. I would not die. I would remain. A living wound stretched across existence, conscious enough to feel every prayer, every horror, every plea for the world to go back to sleep. The gods looked upon me. And turned away. They did not want to rule again. They wanted to forget—just like I once had. ⸻ Now I drift between moments, pinned to reality like a specimen. The priests call the catastrophe The Great Awakening, but nothing truly woke. The world is broken in quieter ways. Shadows linger too long. Children are born knowing things they shouldn’t. Mirrors hesitate. Sometimes, in the dead hours of the night, someone whispers my name by accident. Each time, the wound opens wider. If you are reading this, if these words found you, know this: Do not learn your true name. Do not seek the thirteenth. Because forgetting is the last kindness this world has left.

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