Nocte Yin: Anti-Villain, Anti-Hero and Anti-Everything Else

Chapter Twenty-Seven

There was power in names, and in the naming of things. Names could create or destroy. Names could save or condemn. Names could change the course of destiny, of history, of a thread well spun but cut. Names defined people, places and things, and bound them together, brought them aside or broke them apart. Names were to carve out a being, change them, give them individuality. Names were a magic more than blood and bone, more than sinew and muscle, more than feelings and knowing.

Names were the craft of deities and mortals alike.

For her, she had donned many names in her short life. They had been amassed over the years and layered, like soil, like foundation, in a hierarchal order on the basis of their importance, definition and, most importantly, power. They had been collected, with very little help or acquiescence from her, through either pure coincidence or urgent necessity. They had not been of her own choosing:

“Yin” had been her first and foremost name. She had bore it for the majority of her seventeen years. She had inherited it before she had been born, before she had first breathed, even before she had first been conceived, when she had been nothing more than an egg and and sperm, an “X” and another “X” chromosome. The clan had owned everything that had been a part of her, of her mother and father, of her paternal grandparents, and so on. And in turn, the name granted her certain privileges many would have rejoiced over — many had envied: the blood, the riches, the status, the glory, the self-destruction. Nothing appealed to their sort of people more than the darkness of the Yin, and that pinprick of light that bespoke of the nobility that shielded them from the Xonese dungeons.

Briefly, she had cloaked herself in “Somnium.” It had been given to her by the Elders as a means to an end, a trick of the light and that crucial moment submerged in sleep. It had been a weapon — it had been a spell to deceive and conceal. Temporary. Fleeting. She had not supposed to have been made an impression, leave a fingerprint, mark her presence in those she had been meant to overthrow. It had all supposed to have been a dream twisted into a nightmare. A ghost of herself, a shawl she could use and toss away as many times as she would have liked. Nothing real or true.

“The Lady Necromancer” had been bequeathed to her by the empress, as a gift, as a privilege — as a method for redemption. It had been a name meant to change her tapestry, to remake herself. It had been a name for change. The expectation of her happiness, the knowledge of her duty and the wish for her peace: the weight of the name had been a burden. It was as if they had hoped for her to bring herself back, to be as skilled and apt as the name they awarded her, but there had been more to living than just a name.

“Necromancer” had been the replacement for “Yin,” a substitute that rolled easily from the tongues of Paine and Noir. Short. Succinct. It had not been an insult, but a genuine acknowledgement of what they had seen her as — who they saw her as. It had been a name of power, a courtesy they had given her that bespoke their twisted respect for her. It had been a name with little identity, with little personality, with little distinctiveness. It was a name of power and little else.

She had donned many names in her short life.

But “the Darkness.”

No one had given her that name save herself.

Doctor pressed aside a shrub to let them through, his actions sure as he gave her another smile. The trees had yet to shed all their leaves, but the wind was fiercely cold. The sun hung damp in the sky, a bulb filtered through tissue-paper teetering precariously on the horizon. The air was so thin that sound travelled less, heat faded fast and objects outlined crisp. There was something raw that morning in the woods, with the frost suspended in the air and the breeze scrapping against the broken skin on her knuckles; the chill tearing at her opened flesh.