Chương 47: Chapter 46 - What's In A Name

The yard had settled into early evening by the time anyone brought up names properly, the light going long and gold across the fence posts, the last of the day's heat finally starting to loosen its grip.

Kalsar had produced a battered kettle from somewhere inside the house and set it over a small fire near the training equipment, and the three of them had drifted into the loose half-circle around it without anyone quite deciding to, the way people did when a conversation wasn't finished but nobody wanted to keep standing for it.

Ant screwed up his face immediately the moment the actual question landed — what do we call it — the same reflexive discomfort settling in that had ambushed him weeks earlier over a creature he still hadn't fully named to his own satisfaction. He hated this.

Genuinely, specifically hated it — some particular corner of his brain simply refused to engage properly with the task of putting a name to a thing that mattered, as though the weight of getting it right made every option that occurred to him instantly sound wrong. Maren caught the look instantly, something knowing crossing her face before she'd even finished registering it.

"What about Red Fluffy Thing," she said, half laughing already, clearly enjoying herself far more than the moment strictly warranted.

"You could keep a theme going, at least."

"That is not helping," Ant said, though he couldn't quite keep the edge out of his own voice steady enough to sound properly annoyed. Kalsar looked between the two of them, plainly missing whatever context made the joke land, and after a moment of visible confusion simply decided it wasn't worth chasing down. Some private thing between the two of them, evidently, and not his business to untangle.

He let it pass without comment, arms folding again as he waited for an actual answer, the kettle beginning to hiss softly behind him. Ant looked down at Mahkir instead, some small, half-formed hope rising in him that maybe, for once, this particular problem could simply be handed off to someone else.

"What do you think?" he asked, the question coming out somewhere between genuine hope and outright desperation. Mahkir considered it with the same unhurried calm he brought to everything, tail curling once before he answered. If it were entirely up to me, he said, I'd call it Mahkir and His Gang. Ant stared at him flatly.

"Absolutely not." I assumed as much. Mahkir didn't sound remotely offended by the rejection, already moving past it. You're looking for something more neutral, I take it. Something that doesn't put quite so much weight on any one member of it. He paused, turning the problem over properly now, and Ant could feel the shift in him — the same focused stillness he brought to sizing up an opponent, applied here instead to a question with no obvious right answer.

Even Maren had gone quiet, watching Ant's expression shift and shift again as whatever Mahkir was saying arrived somewhere only Ant could hear it. Given that everyone apparently wants a piece of us, Mahkir continued, something like the Renegades has a certain appeal. Simple. It says what it needs to say. He tilted his head slightly. But if Kalsar genuinely wants the unclanned to see this as somewhere they could actually belong, I think you can do better than that. Something like the Oath of Defiance, perhaps.

We're all of us defiant against the system in one way or another — you, obviously, but Kalsar as much as anyone, and Maren too, now, whether she's fully sat with that yet or not. And a clan is, at the root of it, an oath. People choosing to bind themselves to something, to each other. It fits both halves of what this actually is, rather than only one. You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

Ant sat with that for a moment, saying nothing, running the name through his head a second time before he trusted himself to react to it out loud — and found, somewhat to his own surprise, that he didn't immediately hate it.

"It was Mahkir's idea," Ant said, looking between the two of them.

"Not mine. Figured you should both weigh in properly before we settle on it." Kalsar slapped his knee and let out a genuine laugh, loud enough that Mahkir's ears flicked briefly at the sound.

"The Oath of Defiance. I like it. Guess that means we're being loud and proud about the whole thing, then, rather than quietly getting on with it." He shook his head, still grinning.

"It'll raise some eyebrows, certainly. Half the clans in that hall will hear it and assume we're trying to make a statement. Which, frankly, we probably are. I'm entirely for it." Maren was considerably less enthusiastic, arms folding as she turned the name over with visibly more scrutiny than Kalsar had bothered with.

"It's a bit dramatic," she said eventually.

"Bit on the nose, maybe." She paused, clearly searching for something better and coming up empty.

"I don't have anything stronger to offer instead, though. So I suppose it stands, for now."

"Alright," Ant said, some of the tension in his shoulders easing now that one problem had actually resolved itself.

"What else do we need? A badge, I'm guessing. Colours, something people can actually recognise us by." Kalsar coughed, an oddly deliberate sound, and Ant caught the shift in him immediately — something closer to hesitation than the easy confidence he'd carried through most of the conversation so far. It was strange to see, given how little of anything seemed to rattle the man normally; whatever was coming next, it clearly mattered to him more than the badge itself probably warranted.

"I might have an idea for the badge," Kalsar said.

"There's a story my family told when I was a boy. About an ancestor of mine who fought the original Wraithkin, back when they first appeared." He paused, choosing the next part carefully, the way he did whenever something actually mattered to him.

"The story goes he'd bonded with something extraordinary. Well beyond rare grade — if half of what got passed down is true, possibly beyond legendary entirely. A phoenix." He let that sit a moment, staring into the fire under the kettle rather than at either of them.

"The rumour was that when things got bad enough, it could burn away everything weighing on it — every impurity, every worry, every piece of itself that wasn't worth carrying forward — and rise back out of the ashes new. Whole again." He looked between the two of them.

"For what this clan's actually meant to represent," he said, "I couldn't think of a better symbol if I tried. Every one of us at this fire is carrying something we're trying to burn off and leave behind. Seemed fitting, is all." Maren's expression shifted slowly into something quieter, more thoughtful.

"That's genuinely quite poetic," she said.

"And apt, given where all three of us are actually starting from." She glanced at Ant.

"I'd support that." Ant looked at Maren.

"So far I've chosen the name, Kalsar's chosen the badge — only fair you get the colours." Maren's expression turned extremely serious, her eyes lifting slowly to meet his with the particular gravity of someone about to deliver a verdict of enormous consequence.

"I assume green and pink is out of the question." Everyone froze for half a second, and then all three of them burst out laughing at once, Kalsar's booming loud enough to startle a bird off the fence entirely.

"And you thought my names for Mahkir were bad," Ant said, half teasing, still laughing himself. Maren waved him off, wiping at her eyes once she'd finally settled enough to speak properly again.

"Purple's always been my favourite colour," she said, "and I think Mahkir's eyes — that intense orange-red they go when he's actually angry — would sit well alongside it. Striking without being garish." She sat back, visibly pleased with herself. Nobody objected. Nobody, it seemed, had it in them to argue with any more of today's decisions than they already had.

The kettle finished its work behind them, and Kalsar poured out three cups without asking whether anyone wanted one, passing them around the fire in a silence that felt, for the first time all day, entirely comfortable rather than heavy with everything still left to settle.

Ant wrapped his hands around the cup and looked at the two of them across the flames — a retired champion who'd sworn off clan life entirely until an hour ago, and a researcher who'd just burned down her own future to sit at this fire instead — and found it strange, in a good way, how quickly three people who'd known each other for a matter of weeks had ended up choosing a name, a badge, and a colour together like it was the most natural thing in the world. It was settled.

In the morning, they would make the trip to the clan hall, register the Oath of Defiance properly, and find out exactly what kind of challenges a name like that was about to invite.