Beneath the bleeding darkness that poured from those two crimson moons, a single thought hammered without rest inside my agonizing mind:

  What is my name?

  It wasn't delirium. It wasn't the last spasm of a dying brain.

  It was the only thing I had left, and I refused to let it go.

  Everything else was already gone — the strength, the warmth, the certainty that there existed some order in this world worth respecting. The mana that had once lived in my bones like a second circulatory system now seeped through the cracks of my broken body, black and thick, spilling across the scaffold's wood like something with nowhere left to go.

  But that question.

  That question remained whole.

  What is my name?

  "You have no name," the sky answered with a hollow voice, like the echo of storms extinguished centuries ago.

  I went still.

  Not from fear. From something harder: because the voice didn't sound like a threat. It sounded like truth spoken with an indifference so absolute it was almost tenderness. As if the entire universe were watching me and simply… taking note.

  With the last thread of strength I had left, I repeated it — refusing, refusing, refusing to accept that sentence:

  What is my name…?

  "You were born without a name, my son."

  My son.

  Frozen breath grazed the back of my neck. The metallic stench of blood mixed with something older than rot, something that had no name in any human language. It wasn't a hallucination. It was too cold to be a hallucination. Too precise. Something — someone — was there with me on that scaffold, invisible to the hundreds of eyes watching from below.

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  And it called me son.

  "NO!" I screamed, or believed I screamed at the sky. "I have a name!"

  I didn't want what that voice was offering. I didn't want to be the son of anything that spoke from the void. I wanted my name. The one I had been given. The one I had carried my entire life like armor, like an identity, like the only proof that I had existed before this moment.

  My name is—

  Schiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii.

  The executioner's axe finally fell.

  Not cleanly. Not with the precision that a Chosen deserved — one of the two born across centuries, one of those the very fabric of the world recognizes as different. The blade sank into my flesh and bone and stopped halfway — wedged between splintered vertebrae and tendons that refused to yield, as if my body were rejecting what was happening to it.

  My head was left hanging.

  Still attached to my spine by fibers of flesh that had no business still being there. My eyes — the only things still working, the only things still burning with all the hatred I hadn't been able to finish — stared forward. At the torches. At the blurred faces of those who had come to watch me die.

  The crowd held its breath.

  They thought it was over.

  Then the impossible happened.

  I opened my mouth.

  The black mana seeping from my bones responded one final time — not to a desire, not to an ambition, but to something more primitive: the need to be remembered. To carve into the air of this plaza, into the wood of this scaffold, into the memory of everyone watching, that I had existed. That I had a name. That that name was mine.

  "My name is Auri di Astrea, and I swear that you—"

  The axe fell again.

  A dry crack of metal against bone. A wet snap of tendons splitting in two. My head rolled across the planks, leaving a viscous, gleaming trail of black blood beneath the crimson light.

  The curse remained incomplete.

  My name, spoken for the last time, dissolved into the air without anyone there to catch it.

  Tsk.

  The executioner frowned, visibly disappointed. The axe wasn't sharp enough. Although…

  He narrowed his eyes with an expression of absolute pleasure. His smile opened slowly, like that of a predator who has just discovered a new kind of suffering.

  "It feels so good…" he murmured. "When bad people suffer more."

  ━━━━━━━━━━

  Somewhere without location, something stopped beating.

  Not like a candle.

  Like a sun.

  The two crimson moons blinked.

  Watched.

  Responded.