Chapter 146 — The Wall of Names

Chapter 146: Chapter 146 — The Wall of Names

Mana Sense came easier than Mana Light had, though Neris warned him not to mistake speed for simplicity.

"Different animal entirely," she said, on the morning she finally judged him ready to attempt it. "Light asks you to hold something steady. This asks you to extend something outward and actually listen to what it tells you when it touches something else. Considerably more useful, and considerably easier to botch."

She walked him through the form with the same patient thoroughness she’d brought to everything — drawing the current, this time shaping it thin rather than dense, letting it spread outward from his palm in a slow, searching pulse rather than gathering into a single sustained point.

His first attempts produced nothing detectable beyond a faint tingling that told him little more than that something had, in fact, happened. But by his third try that morning, he felt the pulse brush against the room’s far wall and return something — not words, not even a clear image, simply a vague impression of stone, old, settled that hadn’t been there in his awareness a moment before.

"There," Neris said, watching his expression shift. "That’s the wall talking back to you, in its own limited way. Won’t tell you much about an ordinary wall. Tell it to reach toward something genuinely enchanted, or something carrying a real magical signature, and you’ll understand quickly enough why this earns its keep in the Depths."

He practiced through the remainder of that session and the one following, gradually extending the pulse’s range and learning to parse the faint textures it returned — the difference between ordinary stone and something worked with old craft, between an empty room and one where residual Mana still lingered from a previous casting.

"Good progress," Neris said, closing out what she judged their final dedicated session before orientation’s remaining briefings claimed the rest of his week. "You’ve got both spells settled well enough now to actually rely on them, provided you keep practicing on your own rather than letting the habit lapse the moment I stop watching."

"I don’t intend to let it lapse."

"No, I don’t imagine you do." She studied him with the same brief, assessing curiosity she’d shown from their very first session. "You’re an unusual student, Arlen. Fast where fast shouldn’t be easy, given how late you started. I won’t pretend to understand exactly why. I’ve stopped needing to understand every student I teach, honestly — some people simply carry more capacity for this than their history would suggest."

He thanked her, and left the instruction wing that afternoon with both spells settled into something he could genuinely trust under pressure, and found himself, walking the guild hall’s familiar corridors, remembering Ferrin’s quiet suggestion from weeks earlier — go look at the wall near the eastern archive sometime before your first dive, not after.

He found it that same evening, tucked into a modest, unassuming alcove just off the main archive’s entrance, easy enough to walk past without noticing unless a person already knew to look for it. The wall itself was plain gray stone, unremarkable except for the names carved into it — thousands of them, arranged in careful, close-set columns that stretched from floor to ceiling and continued, Arlen realized with a slow, settling weight, around the alcove’s far corner and out of sight, column after column after column.

He stood there a long while, simply reading, the way he might have read any other significant record — names beside dates, some columns considerably older than others, the carving style shifting subtly across what he guessed were different generations of stonemasons tasked with maintaining it. Some names carried small marks beside them he didn’t understand at first, until a passing archivist, noticing his attention, paused long enough to explain without being asked.

"Guild rank, mostly," she said, nodding toward the marks. "And sometimes a small notation for cause, where the guild judged it useful to record — collapse, creature, misadventure, occasionally simply ’unrecovered.’ Not every death gets a full accounting. The Depths don’t always leave enough behind to properly explain themselves."

"How far back does this go?"

"This wall alone covers a little over forty years. There’s a much older section in the archive proper — records going back centuries, from before any wall was ever commissioned to hold them." She studied him a moment, not unkindly. "First time seeing it?"

"First time," Arlen admitted. "An instructor mentioned it during orientation. Told me to come look before my first dive rather than after."

"Good advice. Most people who skip it end up here eventually regardless, once someone they know gets added to it. Better to understand what you’re walking into with your eyes open." She offered a small, tired smile, the kind of expression Arlen suspected came from years spent working in close proximity to exactly this kind of quiet, accumulated grief. "Doesn’t mean you shouldn’t go. Just means you shouldn’t go thinking it’s simple."

She left him to his own thoughts after that, and Arlen remained a while longer, tracing the recent columns with careful attention — names from within the past year, considerably fresher than the older, weathered carvings further along the wall’s length.

He didn’t linger on any single name, exactly — there were too many for that, the sheer accumulated scale of it resisting the kind of personal weight a single grave might have carried. What settled into him instead was simpler, and somehow heavier for its simplicity: an entire wall, forty years deep, and still growing, dedicated to a danger he hadn’t even properly faced yet.

This is what I’m actually walking toward, he thought,the recognition arriving with quiet, sobering clarity. Not a single fight, however dangerous. An accumulated, ongoing weight that’s already claimed this many people before I ever set foot down there.

He made his way back out of the archive as evening properly settled over the guild district, and found Dallin waiting near the main hall’s entrance, apparently having guessed where his afternoon had led him.

"Ferrin sent you there, didn’t he," Dallin said, falling into step beside him without needing to ask further.

"How’d you know?"

"He sends everyone eventually. Some cohorts sooner than others." Dallin’s usual easy manner had softened into something quieter, more genuinely reflective. "My own instructor took me the week before I ever set foot past the entrance. Wanted me carrying the weight of it properly, rather than pretending it wasn’t there."

"Does it get easier? Having seen it?"

"Different, maybe. Not easier, exactly." Dallin considered the question with real care. "I think it just means you go down there understanding what the stakes actually are, instead of finding out the hard way. Better to carry that in with you than carry it out."

They walked the rest of the way back toward the guild district’s outer edge in comfortable, unhurried quiet, and Arlen found himself, despite the heaviness of the afternoon, genuinely grateful for the company — the same quiet solidarity he remembered from Halvard’s steady presence during the boundary crisis, the particular comfort of not having to carry a difficult thing entirely alone.

"Administrative clearance should come through any day now," Dallin said, as they parted ways near the Foxglove’s warm, welcoming windows. "Corwin mentioned the paperwork’s nearly finished on his end. Won’t be long before all this orientation actually means something."

"I’m ready for it," Arlen said, and found, turning the words over as he watched Dallin continue on toward his own lodging, that he genuinely believed them — not the careless confidence of someone who hadn’t properly reckoned with the danger, but the steadier, hard-earned certainty of someone who finally had.