Chapter 2772: Story 2773: The Name His Mother Feared

Ronan remembered the cradle.

It stood beneath a sky without stars, surrounded by six smaller cradles carved from black bone. A woman with white hair knelt beside him, her red eyes drowning in tears. His mother.

But she was younger then, and her hands trembled as she held a golden blade above his heart.

“Forgive me, my son,” she whispered. “If you remember your first name, the world will remember what it was before creation.”

Ronan gasped.

The vision shattered.

Lyra’s shadow tightened around her throat. She clawed at the darkness, but it had no flesh to wound. Her dagger slipped from her fingers, clattering across the stone.

“Ronan!” she choked.

He lunged toward her.

The Nameless King raised its hand, and invisible pressure slammed Ronan to his knees.

“You remember now,” the King murmured. “You remember the woman who stole your first name and buried it beneath a borrowed life.”

The forgotten child sobbed harder. Red light pulsed through the cracks in his chest.

“She did it to save you!”

The King’s hood turned toward him.

“Silence, little heart.”

Black tendrils burst from the floor and wrapped around the child’s wrists. He struggled, but the chains dragged him toward the throne.

Ronan’s brothers moved to help. Elias summoned his black chains, Aren raised a silver barrier, and Darian ignited violet flames around his fists. Their powers flickered beneath the King’s presence, barely strong enough to resist.

Cael forced himself upright.

“Ronan, listen to me! The name is not merely a word. It is the first promise ever made. If you speak it, you will give him the right to become what he was.”

“And if I refuse?” Ronan demanded.

The King’s fingers closed.

Lyra’s shadow squeezed.

Her face reddened, but her eyes remained fixed on Ronan. With the last strength in her arm, she reached toward the fallen dagger and dragged it closer with her fingertips.

The King laughed softly.

“Refusal changes nothing. Your name already belongs to me.”

“No,” whispered the forgotten child.

His red heart flared.

The chains around him melted into streams of crimson light. The dead kings recoiled as the child lifted his head, and for one terrible instant, he looked older than the world.

“You took his name,” the child said. “But you never understood why she gave him another.”

The King rose from his throne.

The chamber cracked beneath its feet.

“Because she feared what he would become.”

“Wrong,” the child replied. “She feared what you would become when he remembered.”

Lyra finally seized her dagger and drove it into her own shadow.

The darkness shrieked.

Her shadow released her throat and snapped back beneath her feet. She collapsed, coughing, then immediately snatched up her bow.

Ronan rose as golden fire spread across his arms.

The King stepped toward him.

“Tell me, First Son. Who were you before Ronan Draven?”

Ronan looked at Lyra, then at his brothers, and finally at the crying child whose heart beat with something ancient.

He understood why his mother had chosen a new name.

It had not been a disguise.

It had been a boundary.

Ronan opened his mouth.

But before he could answer, Cael screamed.

A golden symbol appeared on his forehead—the same symbol carved into the King’s throne.

The King tilted its faceless hood.

“Too late,” it whispered. “Your brother has remembered my true name.”

And somewhere beneath the chamber, something enormous began to wake.