The Wrong Name

Written for Promtpt #1 of the One Month, Many Lives challenge led by Ever Expanding Narratives

For more information on the One Month, Many Lives challenge, visit Ever Expanding Narratives.

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OMML Prompt #1

Name: Keeper Mayrel, known as a merchant to the elite.

Description: You see an individual, who looks as old as you can get, not that it's easy to tell with the rather creepy mask they wear

Background: The Keeper likes to be paid in rarities, and will say whatever it takes to land a deal for one, a fact that has often had customers turn nasty

Pivotal moment: Keeper Mayrel never did find out why talking about the parents of his newest customer caused such a ruckus, but moving town to escape the fallout, was probably the right call. Probably.

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Some names drift through dreams, patient as frost. Speak them aloud, and you’ll remember—too late—that some words have teeth.

Keeper Mayrel’s stall was a deliberate disorder: moon‑silver spoons twinkling beside the husk of a faerie egg, a vial of midnight rain that caught and held the light like trapped ink.

Coin was vulgar here.
Payment was in rarities—
and rarities alone.

The boy came at noon. Clean boots. Quiet steps. His gaze lingered over the display with deliberate care, pausing where only the blood‑titled paused — on things passed down in whispers, never written down.

“A gift,” he said at last. “For my beloved. We are to be married tomorrow. Lady Daria, of Fairwater.”

Mayrel smiled beneath the mask. Love—madness in its sweetest disguise. Its victims the easiest prey.

His mask had no mouth, yet when he spoke, his voice drifted from it like warm smoke, smooth as lacquer, edged with something older than patience.

He let a smile seep into his tone, giving no thought to the words that tumbled out:

“Ah yes. Lord Fairwater. A pretty name to hide the man behind it. When I knew him he carried no such title. He was called Veyran the Hollow. A name not meant to be spoken aloud—”

He stopped.

The market went silent, sucked cold by the pull of dread — as if the breath had been drawn from every chest, every shadow, every scrap of wind. The air thickened, heavy with a gathering pressure, and then—like a bowstring loosed—something flung the sound away. It slid between the stalls, swift and certain, before spilling into the open distance. The echo rolled outward with purpose, curling through alleys, threading the forest, slipping over the hills like a hound bound to find the master it served.

Faces turned toward that vanishing sound, drawn and pale, as though the name had taken something they would never get back.

Mayrel moved without hesitation, sweeping a few small objects into a bag before slipping through the back curtain. Behind him, the silence fractured into a ripple of voices. The name repeating, gathering weight, gathering teeth.

By nightfall, he was miles from town, crouched beside a half‑dead mule, sack in lap. The wind had shifted, carrying with it a faint, dry whisper. Not words. Not quite. But the cadence was familiar.

The name.

It was moving through the dark like a thing with purpose. Threading between trees, across stone, under doorways. No matter how far he fled, the syllables would keep crawling, keep hunting, until they found the ears they belonged to.

Veyran the Hollow.

Mayrel tightened his grip on the sack. Even the moon had hidden itself. Somewhere behind him, the summoning had already begun.

Probably the right call to flee.

To leave his treasures behind.

Probably.

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