Chapter 64 – New Name
Names are chains.
Erynd Viester Milton.
Odin, to the ones praying underground.
Swordmaster's son, to the nobles.
Border brat, to the people who want him dead.
Too many chains.
I needed something I could wear and take off. Something that wasn't tied to Father, or the Academy, or the Empire, or any of the thousand little stories people were already writing about me without asking.
Something that could walk into a city, break a few things, and walk back out without dragging everything else with it.
"Harbard," I murmured.
The wind stole the word from my mouth and threw it behind us.
I floated in the open sky, a dark dot between layers of cloud, too high for birds, too low to bother the stars. Below, the world was just texture and colour—fields like patchwork, rivers like silver threads, roads like scars.
"Harbard," I said again, testing the sound.
Melody's voice drifted up from where she hung at my side, invisible to anyone but me, her presence a familiar weight in my thoughts.
"Another name?" she asked. "We're collecting them now, are we?"
"Harbard fits," I said. "A wanderer, a ferryman, an old man who knows more than he says and less than people think. It's a good mask."
"You're not old," she said.
"After enough timelines, age gets weird," I replied. "Besides, the name isn't for me. It's for them. Harbard is someone they can point at and blame when things go wrong. Erynd needs clean records. Odin needs worship. Harbard just needs a road."
Melody hummed thoughtfully.
"You like the idea," I added.
"I like anything that lets you move without dragging your father's crest behind you like a target," she said. "Also, it sounds dramatic. 'Harbard, the masked wanderer.' That's almost as good as 'Odin, the God of Yggdrasil' for the cultists."
"Not a god," I said automatically.
"Mm," she said, which meant she'd heard me and chosen to ignore it.
I let the argument die there and focused on my body.
The exoskeleton rested against my skin, a second frame under my clothes. Grum's Mark 1 had been a prototype—heavy, temperamental, built out of whatever future-copper alloy and dwarven steel the forge had on hand. This was different.
Mark 2.
Full adamantium lattice, hugging my spine and limbs like an extra set of bones. Ethan's runes crawled along its joints and plates—thin lines of blue-white that pulsed in time with my heartbeat, drawing ambient mana and feeding it into tiny reservoirs.
"What did Grum say?" I muttered to myself, adjusting the flow in my legs. "If you break this one, I'll break your head before I fix it?"
Melody laughed softly.
"He said worse," she reminded me. "But you did scare him with how fast you outgrew Mark 1. He didn't design it to handle 'insane child who keeps stacking derivations and artifacts like playing cards.'"
I flexed my fingers.
The exoskeleton flexed with them, perfectly synchronized.
Mark 2 wasn't just armour.
It was an extension.
Grum had hammered the frame. Ethan had laid the stabilizing runes. The Yggdrasil's quiet madness had done the rest. Every step I'd taken since I put it on had imprinted something into it—patterns of movement, the way my aura flared when I fought, the way my mana channels flexed when I cast.
Ethan had called it "evolution."
Grum had called it "creepy."
I called it "useful."
"Do you feel it?" I asked Melody.
She tilted her head, phantom hair blown back by a wind that didn't touch her.
"Yes," she said. "It echoes you. Like a sheath learning the shape of the blade. Given time, it'll move before you tell it to."
"It already does, a little," I said. "When I jump, it corrects my landing angle. When my feet slip, it grips. It's like… a half-second of advice."
"Advice that gets stronger as you do," she said. "I'm almost jealous."
"Don't start competing with my skeleton," I said. "I have enough problems."
"You say that," she teased, "but you're the one who keeps collecting cursed equipment and telling it to keep up."
She wasn't wrong.
***
Ocria lay ahead.
I couldn't see it yet, but the shape of the land told me where we were. The Ducal Kingdom of Morel sprawled out beneath us, a patch of stubborn civilization wedged between unfriendly seas and too-interested neighbors.
Morel's capital, Ocria, was old by local standards. Older than the Empire's last regrouping. Older than the Academy. It held layers of history under its streets—wars, treaties, betrayals, forgotten cults.
And one martial artist who should have died in the Safon trench.
"Master of Eight Currents," I murmured.
An old man from another land, who had once crossed the veil of Safon in a boat that should have capsized and a body that should have failed. In one timeline, he never made it. In another, he showed up in Ocria, opened a tiny school, taught children how not to die when monsters clawed at the walls, and then vanished when the Abyssal Pact's chaos hit its peak.
Or maybe he'd died quietly. Or maybe he'd seen the Outer influence and decided this world wasn't worth the effort.
I didn't know.
I knew only that in my last lifetimes, by the time his name reached me, he was already gone.
"Maybe this time," I said, "I get there first."
Melody drifted closer, walking in the air at my shoulder.
"Why him?" she asked. "You have your sword, your magic, your cult, your Jarls, your little hidden city. Why chase one old man with calloused hands and a strange stance?"
"Because he did something I never could," I said. "He crossed the Safon veil with nothing but his fists and his breath. Because he survived monsters that ate ships whole. Because he turned his body into a weapon without ever touching mana the way we do."
I paused, trying to put it into words that didn't sound like some child's hero worship.
"Because I've seen what the Outer things do to mana," I said finally. "They twist it. Rot it. Eat it. If there's a way to fight that doesn't start and end with more mana, I want it. I want to learn it. I want to steal it. I want to give it to the ones who will be fighting when I'm too dead or too tired to stand."
Melody was quiet for a moment.
"Always planning for the fight that comes after you," she said. "You're very selfish in a strange way."
"I'm greedy," I agreed. "If I'm going to break myself across timelines, I want the cracks to mean something."
"Harbard, the Greedy," she said thoughtfully. "Has a ring."
"Absolutely not," I said.
She laughed.
***
I angled my body and let gravity take me.
Vector obeyed my will with the ease of long practice. The mana around me bent, coaxed and pressed into a shape it recognized—a slope, invisible but firm, a forty-five degree slide stretching from the high cold to the distant ground.
Flying is the wrong word for what I was doing.
Real flying is inefficient—fighting gravity with brute force, shoving mana under your feet like a clumsy, endless jump.
This was falling with very strict rules.
Mana replaced mana faster than I spent it. Ninety meters of ambient field, vacuumed and filtered by Mark 2's runes, flowed into my channels. I nudged wind magic into place under my boots, not to lift but to reduce drag, to make my path smooth.
To anyone on the ground, if they somehow looked up, I would have been a dark speck moving in a straight, impossible line, no flapping, no gesture.
To a mage, if they could see that high, I would have been a man lying flat in the sky, hugging an invisible path, riding it down like a child on a frozen hill.
To me, it was training.
The air thinned until my lungs began to burn, each breath a little knife in my chest. The mask—my transmogrified leather, hiding a full adamantium plate underneath—did not help.
I could feel the metal over my mouth and nose, the way it broke the flow of air just enough to make every inhale a fraction harder.
"Note to self," I wheezed. "Ask Ethan to design ventilation. Or gills. Or something."
"You chose to strap a full metal face onto yourself and then go to where there's no air," Melody pointed out. "This is not a design flaw. This is you."
"Sabotage," I said. "Train the lungs, train the will. Or pass out and fall. Either way, I learn something."
"That's not how logic works," she said.
"That's exactly how my logic works," I replied.
She didn't argue. She'd seen my logic.
Up. Down. Burn. Heal. Die. Try again.
I held the burn until the edges of my vision shimmered, then relaxed the Vector angle, letting myself glide lower. Denser air filled my lungs, the pain easing from knives to a dull ache.
When I could breathe without thinking about it, I pushed back up, carving another loop into an invisible sky no one else could see.
Again.
Again.
The exoskeleton adjusted with me, micro-corrections I barely felt—tightening here, relaxing there, shifting weight from ankles to hips to spine. Learning.
We spent hours like that.
Sky. Slide. Burn. Glide. Think.
By the time Ocria's outline finally appeared on the horizon, my muscles trembled pleasantly, a good kind of exhaustion. The kind that meant work done, not life wasted.
"Harbard," Melody said quietly, as the city grew larger. "What will you do if the old master refuses to teach you?"
"Ask politely again," I said.
"And if he still refuses?"
"Steal with my eyes," I said. "Watch every movement. Map every breath. Copy as much as I can and patch the holes with what I already know."
"And if he dies before you get there?" she asked.
I looked at the city.
"At this point," I said, "that would be normal."
***
Ocria should have been…
Busy.
That was the word.
A ducal capital is never quiet. There are always carts, always smoke, always noise. People coming and going, markets shouting, smithies hammering, bells ringing from temples that no one quite believes in but still attends.
Ocria was not busy.
Ocria was burning.
I knew something was wrong before my eyes caught up.
The wind changed first—bringing with it a smell that I'd hoped not to know this soon in this run.
Smoke is usually just smoke.
Wood. Cloth. Maybe a bit of oil, if a warehouse catches.
This smoke was thick. Heavy. It carried too many stories at once—coal, pitch, rope, wet stone, and the sharp, bitter tang of things that were never meant to burn.
And under it all, faint but unmistakable:
Cooked meat.
Even from this height.
"That's not good," Melody said softly.
Her understatement made something in my chest twist.
I lowered.
The closer I got, the worse the details became.
Ocria's walls stood, mostly intact. The gates were closed. That was almost normal—you close your gates in a crisis.
What wasn't normal was the way the flames licked up from *inside* the walls, taller than some of the towers, black and orange and… wrong.
Not spreading like a normal fire.
Dancing.
Leaping in patterns that had nothing to do with wind.
Sections of the city glowed with a dull, sickly light not quite the colour of any flame I knew. Streets were empty where they should have been crowded, and crowded where they should have been clear—knots of movement, frantic, trampling, scattering.
I focused.
There.
In the central district, where the duke's manor and training grounds and main square met like points on a triangle, something moved that didn't fit any category.
A shape like a man and a tower and a broken tree, all shifting over each other. Limbs that sometimes bent the right way and sometimes didn't. Joints where there shouldn't be joints. A head that split into three and then closed into one, faces flickering between human and not.
Around it, guards and mages and civilians were either running or burning, sometimes both.
It turned.
Even from this distance, I felt it notice me.
Not as Harbard. Not as Erynd. Not as Odin.
Just as another piece of "here" that didn't fit whatever it wanted "here" to be.
Its head-crowd of faces tilted.
The flames nearest it changed colour, shading from orange to a deep, bruised purple.
My heart sped up, a fast, hard drum in my chest.
Melody's hand settled on my shoulder, cold and steady.
"Master," she said softly. "That pattern…"
"I see it," I said.
Outer touch.
A different flavour than the Depth fragment she'd cut before, but in the same family. Cousin, not twin.
"I thought we'd have more time," I said.
"You always think that," she said. "You've been wrong every run."
She wasn't wrong.
I hovered there, just outside the range where any ordinary eye could spot me, watching a city choke on wrong fire and a thing wearing human shapes like clothing.
Harbard, the wanderer, the masked nobody, was supposed to arrive quietly.
Instead, I was watching an entire capital scream.
I clenched my fist.
The exoskeleton responded—plates tightening, runes flaring faintly.
"New name," Melody murmured. "New mask. Same problem."
"Same problem," I agreed.
I began to angle down.
Whatever I'd expected to find in Ocria—a quiet master, a modest school, a new path of fists and breath—this wasn't it.
This was something else.
This was someone else's move.
As I dropped toward the burning city, feeling the heat lick up even from this height, a single thought pushed itself above the rest.
*If the Outer things are already walking under daylight in a ducal capital, then I am behind again.*
I bared my teeth behind the metal of my mask.
"Harbard," I said softly, to myself, to the mask, to the exoskeleton, to the world. "Remember your name."
Then I saw what was standing in the main square—who was standing in front of the monster, alone, fists clenched, back straight, aura warped by something I didn't yet recognize—
And my stomach dropped.
"…you shouldn't be here," I whispered.
The wind tore the words away.
The city burned on.