Chương 1: Prologue: Identity

The morning cold in Terracanto always tasted of damp ash and resignation. She knew it well. She had breathed it in day after day, believing it was the air of one who has no past, of one born from mud and destined to return to it, without a name to bind her, nor memories to pursue her. But memory is not something you possess. It is something that possesses you. At times, in the heavy silence of the cave, amid the smell of old parchment and burned resin, the letters would begin to dance.

They were not merely ink on goatskin; they were threads, thin and silvery, stretching from the pages to coil around her wrists, her throat, that hollow place where her proper name should have been. The name is a key. She learned that too late. If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation. Not the key to a chest of riches, nor to a noble door carved from ebony wood. It is the key to a cell you did not know was waiting for you.

The one that opens the path back to a life she did not choose, to a bloodline she does not recognize, to a title that weighs heavier than a slab of stone upon her chest. And when she finally found it, when its syllables rang in her mind like a funeral toll, there was no turning back. Because a name, once spoken, has an owner. And that owner, no matter how much you deny it, how much you flee, how deeply you hide in the filthiest corners of the marsh… … always comes to claim you.

Now the cold no longer tastes like ash. It tastes like polished steel, of earth churned with foreign blood, of the charged stillness that precedes the lightning strike. And she, there, between walls that are not hers, with a name that chokes her, remembers the only truth the marsh's mud ever taught her: It isn't hunger that kills you. It's identity.