The corpse had no name.
That was the first thing Wren noticed. The second was how clean the erasure was—no jagged edges where a soul should be, no bloodied fingerprints of a clumsy name-thief. Just smooth, empty skin where the man's epitaphs should have been inked.
Moonlight pooled in the alley like spilled mercury. Wren crouched, gloved fingers hovering over the dead man's wrist. Around them, Echo City hummed: carriage wheels on cobblestones, the distant shriek of a newsboy hawking headlines ("Scriptorium Executes Name-Hoarders!"), the ever-present murmur of a thousand stories being rewritten.
They shouldn't touch this. Nameless deaths were Scriptorium business.
But the hunger won.
Wren peeled back their glove and pressed bare fingertips to the corpse's pulse point—
—and remembered.
Salt. A woman weeping. The weight of a knife in their hand.
The vision shattered as a name surged into Wren's skin—not a fragment, not a shard, but a complete name, thrashing like a hooked fish. It burned up their arm in glyphs of liquid shadow, searing itself between their ribs.
They staggered back, choking on the taste of "Alistair Verity".
Impossible. Names couldn't be taken whole. Not unless—
A boot crunched on broken glass behind them.
"Interesting," purred a voice like smothered fire. "You absorbed him."
Wren turned.
The woman wore a mask of solidified moonlight, her gown stitched from torn book pages. Around her neck hung a vial of swirling ink—the mark of the Cult of the Silent Moon.
She tilted her head. "How many names have you stolen, little ghost?"
Wren's stolen name pulsed in their chest. Alistair Verity. A historian. A heretic.
A man they'd somehow known.
The cultist smiled. "Ah. You're starting to remember."
Above them, the moon blinked.