The Gray Register

In the year 320 of the Guangyin Calendar, the Sunwheel split into three and fell from the sky. The gods had been silent for three hundred years, and they would speak no more. Every chapel in Ormea held a copy of the Register. Those whose names were written in it were protected by the Radiance. Those whose names were absent might as well not exist. Villian Cole was sixteen, the daughter of a carpenter in Graybridge. On the day she was born, the light did not fall upon her during the chapel's naming ceremony. No one noticed. She didn't think much of it either. That is, until the Blight crossed the boundary markers in the north. It was a black mist. If someone in the mist called out your full name, you had to answer. Those who answered were no longer human. That night, Villian stood in the mist, and it flowed around her. The space for her name on paper was blank. The Grayguard Institute was recruiting. You entered by handing over your name, and left with only a number. They took in children no one else wanted. The institute also collected a kind of ash: whenever they disposed of a thing that had answered its name, they scraped off a pinch, sealed it in a leather pouch, and recorded it in a ledger. The instructor pressed a blank white-waxwood tag into her hand and said only two things. "Before you carve it, don't tell anyone your name." "Train your hearing." When someone was called, they had to answer. And she had to learn to answer the names that should never have been answered. A name had to be entered in the register for someone to count as human. But her page was blank.