The name surfaced where Vale least expected it.
Not in forbidden archives.
Not in Covenant records.
Not in erased doctrine.
It surfaced in a children's rhyme.
Vale heard it while passing through the lower residential quarter of the Sound Clan. A group of young disciples were playing, chasing one another through stone corridors while chanting nonsense verses that had survived generations without scrutiny.
He stopped when one line caught his ear.
The words were slurred, half-forgotten, stripped of meaning by time—but the sound was unmistakable.
Gale.
Vale stood still.
The children ran past him, laughing, unaware that they had spoken something dangerous.
That night, Vale asked Elder Rin.
The elder's reaction was immediate.
"Where did you hear that name?" Rin asked.
"In a rhyme," Vale replied. "It wasn't taught. It survived."
Rin exhaled slowly and closed the door to his study.
"That name was never fully erased," he said. "It couldn't be."
Vale waited.
"Gale was not a title," Rin continued. "It was a given name. Spoken too often. Remembered too deeply. Even the Covenant learned that some things resist deletion."
Vale felt a faint pressure in his chest.
"So they buried it," he said.
"They fragmented it," Rin corrected. "Stripped it of meaning. Turned it into sound without context."
Vale leaned back.
"Gale Aerindel," he said.
Rin's eyes flicked up sharply. "You know the full name."
"I remember fragments," Vale replied. "Not memories. Not yet. Just… alignment."
Rin was silent for a long moment.
"When Gale lived," he said finally, "wind was not an element. It was authority. The air moved because it acknowledged him."
Vale closed his eyes briefly.
"And that frightened them."
"Yes."
Rin moved to a shelf and removed a thin, hidden ledger.
"This is all that remains unedited," he said, handing it over.
Inside were eyewitness accounts, fragmented and inconsistent. Soldiers describing pressure that bent formations apart. Mages describing spells unraveling before activation. Void practitioners describing refusal.
One phrase appeared repeatedly.
Breath was taken.
Vale's fingers tightened.
"He didn't just move air," Vale said. "He governed it."
Rin nodded. "And governance without system is intolerable to systems."
Vale closed the ledger.
For the first time, the name felt heavy.
Not as a crown.
As a responsibility.
If Gale had once existed as truth, then Vale's survival meant that truth was returning.
And the world, which had spent centuries pretending Gale was only a sound, would soon be forced to remember what that sound once meant.