What's worse than death? Being forgotten while alive.
"You think power is fire and swords?
True power is the ability to erase a man from his own reflection."
— Vessira the Hollow-Womb, Sorceress of the Circle
I.
The spell did not arrive with a bang.
It arrived with a silence so complete it cracked the minds of songbirds.
It wasn't cast from a mountaintop.
It was whispered from a tower that didn't exist, into the bones of the wind.
And when it reached Emberhall…
People began forgetting their own names.
II.
Reginal stood atop the obsidian ramparts, Mournshard gripped in a gauntlet of shadow-forged steel.
The fires in the city flickered.
But not from cold.
From doubt.
Children woke up screaming, unable to recognize their mothers.
Soldiers dropped their weapons, confused by the banner they once swore to die for.
Whole rooms went quiet — not from fear, but because they didn't remember who they were angry at.
"It's begun," whispered Kammy, blade already drawn.
"What is it?" Milo growled.
"It's a spell," Reginal said. "It doesn't kill the body."
"Then what?"
"It strips the story."
III.
The first victim was Darak the Stonehand, a general Reginal had bled beside in three campaigns.
One moment, he was reciting battle formations.
The next, he stared at Reginal and asked:
"My King… who are you?"
Reginal didn't flinch.
But his flame flickered.
Something deeper than magic had been used.
This wasn't a curse.
It was a weaponized forgetting.
IV.
The Silent Circle called it Unnamecraft.
A spell-forging so ancient, it required sacrificing memory to power it.
Every time Vessira cast it, she lost part of herself.
She didn't care.
Because in her eyes, the world itself was the lie — and Reginal, with his fire, his rise, his soul still intact?
He was the last story keeping the old lies alive.
He had to be erased.
V.
At Emberhall's heart, Reginal entered the Echocrypt, a vault of memories sealed in bloodwax and guarded by ancestral specters.
He knew what he had to do.
"To fight forgetfulness," the Echo-Keeper told him,
"you must become memory itself. Not a man. Not a king. A myth."
"What's the price?" Reginal asked.
"Everything you remember."
He paused.
Then handed over his name.
VI.
In one breath, he forgot the taste of his mother's bread.
In the next, he forgot the sound of Kammy's laughter.
By the time he stepped back out into the world…
He had no fear left.
Because fear is tied to memory.
He wasn't just Reginal J. Ashveil anymore.
He was the Ashborne Writ.
The living counterspell to the Silent Circle.
And where he walked, forgetting died.
VII.
Kammy wept when he passed her in the hall.
"Do you remember me?" she asked, voice trembling.
"I remember purpose," he said, voice now layered with something inhuman.
"Then fight for it," she said. "And when you win… I'll remind you who you are."
He nodded.
And vanished in a storm of flame and broken syllables.
TO BE CONTINUED…
Next: Chapter XVII – "The Siege of the Unwritten"
With his memory offered to protect his people, Reginal leads the Emberborn to the edge of the world — to destroy the Silent Circle in their own lair: a place where language itself is outlawed.
But not all who follow him will return.