The world begins to remember. And in a city even darker than Velvora, a girl who once lost everything begins her journey toward Noxvallis—with a truth the Unshamed fear more than death.
The chapter opens not in Velvora.Not in Noxvallis.Not even in the known regions of the Five Pillars.
But somewhere deeper.
Beneath the rotting roots of an abandoned metropolis—buried in a hollow world that eats its own history.
The City had no name. Not anymore.It once did. Long ago. But like all forbidden things, it was stripped from record, whispered only by ghosts and those too broken to forget. Locals simply called it "Wane."
And in the center of Wane, surrounded by towers with no doors, windows that looked inward, and clocks that ran backward, a girl sat alone—writing.
She wrote with her finger, not on paper, but on stone.Each word etched into the bones of the city.
Her name was Ira.But that too wasn't her real name.That had been taken the day the Watch erased her.
She looked maybe sixteen. Pale. Silent. Her eyes shimmered like still water over a drowned library. Books lay scattered around her like relics—blank pages soaked in red ink.
She whispered as she carved.
"They'll remember when they're ready.""When Asher sees me… he won't remember either.""But the city will."
And then, for the first time in decades, Wane breathed.
A ripple passed through the city's dead air. The false stars above blinked. The ground hissed like a lung filled with ash.
Someone else had awoken the Chronicle of Names.And in doing so, had disturbed her curse.
Ira stood.
She wore a cloak of stitched shadow—woven from names she had tried to save. But only one still clung to her like a scar.
Asher Blackwood.
She didn't hate him.
She remembered him from before Velvora fell into itself—from before the Pact with the succubi, before the debt of the Fifth Throne.
She had watched the Watch drag his bloodline into silence.She had screamed as she was cut out from his story.She had bled in a world that no longer had a page for her.
But now?
The pages were opening again.
She turned toward the rusted gates of Wane.Far above, in Noxvallis and Velvora, cities stirred and named their wars.But Ira?
She named her truth.
"I am the name they were too afraid to write.""I am the first lie."
And with that, she stepped out of the broken church she'd made her prison.
Elsewhere — Velvora
Asher stirred.
He had dreamt of a girl he didn't know.
No—
Didn't remember.
Her eyes had said his name like it was a wound. Her voice didn't speak in the dream—but it screamed in his bones.
Lucien noticed. "You saw something again?"
Asher didn't answer right away.
Rosa was already cross-referencing Watch movements. Danya traced psychic echoes left from the Vault's collapse. Hark stood guard at the edge of the platform.
But Asher?
He turned toward the northern sky.Toward a place his memory said didn't exist—But his soul said never stopped calling.
Wane.
And far away, the Unshamed, who had declared their truth beneath Noxvallis, paused.
One among them trembled.
"She's alive.""The Forgotten Girl still remembers."
And if she remembered—
The war was far from over.
It hadn't even begun.
[End of Chapter 126]
-------------------------------
Next Chapter Preview: Chapter 127 – "When a Name Bites Back"Asher's visions begin to bleed into reality, and Ira's path cuts through layers of forbidden memory. But the truth has its own predators—and not all names want to be remembered.