Chapter 38: The True Story of Lanre

THE STORY that Bredon told was not the story I expected.

We sat in the pavilion as the afternoon light slanted through the thorned roses, casting shadows like dark lace across the Tak board between us. The game lay forgotten, pieces scattered from our second match. What mattered now was not territory or strategy, but truth.

“You want to understand Lanre,” Bredon said. “You want to understand the Chandrian, the doors, the war that broke the world. Very well. But I warn you — this story will not give you the comfort of villains and heroes.”

“I don’t want comfort. I want truth.”

“Then listen carefully.” His voice shifted into the cadence of an ancient telling. “You know about the Creation War. The Namers and Shapers. The seven cities. Iax and the stolen moon. I won’t retell what you already know. I’ll tell you what you don’t.”

He settled back in his chair.

“The war needed a general. And the general it found was Lanre.”

Lanre was not a Namer. Not a Shaper. Simply a soldier — brilliant, passionate, utterly devoted to defending the world he loved.

When Lanre spoke, men listened. When Lanre fought, men followed. When Lanre bled, men found the courage to bleed beside him.

But war is not won by generals alone.

And so, in the fourth year of the conflict, Lanre sought help.

Lyra was a Namer — one of the greatest who had ever lived. Where other Namers knew a handful of deep names, Lyra knew dozens. She was called the Lady of Dreams, the Singer of Silent Songs.

Lanre came to her tower on a night when stars fell like rain from a sky torn by Shaper workings. He climbed the thousand steps to her chamber, bleeding from wounds that should have killed him twice over.

“I need your help,” he said.

She studied him — a man half-dead from climbing a thousand steps to ask for aid he had no reason to expect.

“You’re a fool,” she said.

“I know.”

“You’ll probably die.”

“I know that too.”

She was quiet for a long moment. Then she laughed — a sound like bells, like the first clear note of morning.

“Perhaps foolishness is what this war needs.”

She helped him to his feet. And from that moment, they were never truly apart.

I found myself smiling despite the weight of the story. “He sounds like an idiot.”

“The best kind,” Bredon said. “The kind who changes the world.”

They married in the spring, with the sounds of distant battle as their wedding music. Their vows were simple.

“I will stand beside you,” Lanre said, “until the ending of the world or the ending of my breath.”

“I will stand beside you,” Lyra answered, “until the stars forget to shine and the silence swallows everything.”

Together, they were unstoppable. Lanre’s tactical genius, combined with Lyra’s naming power, turned the tide of battle after battle. They reclaimed cities, pushed the Shapers back, kindled hope in hearts that had forgotten its warmth.

But the Shapers had one weapon that even Lanre and Lyra could not defeat.

At Drossen Tor, the forces of the seven cities made their final stand against a thing the Shapers had made from the void between worlds. It was not alive in any meaningful sense. It did not think or feel. It simply destroyed.

Lanre faced it. He fought for three days — combat that made the very air scream. On the third day, he fell. The thing consumed him. Not his body, but his essence. His name. One moment he stood. The next, he was gone.

Lyra screamed.

What happened next is difficult to describe. She reached into the place where Lanre had been and she called to him. Not his name — that was gone. She called to the love between them. The connection that war and death could not sever.

Against all reason, against all possibility — Lanre answered.

He came back wrong.

Not evil — not then. But changed. Damaged. The thing that had consumed him had left a mark. A darkness in his eyes. A silence in his soul that even Lyra’s voice could not fill.

“I saw the truth,” he told her. “That nothing lasts. That everything ends. No matter how hard we fight, eventually the darkness wins.”

Around them, the war was ending. The Shapers scattered. The world began to heal. Lanre and Lyra were heroes.

But Lanre was not the same.

“How long?” I asked. My throat was tight.

“Years,” Bredon said softly. “What matters is that he found what he was looking for.”

Lyra died on a spring morning, when the flowers were blooming and the world seemed impossibly, cruelly beautiful.

It was not a battle. Not an assassination. She simply stopped breathing. Her heart gave out.

Lanre was at her side. He held her as the warmth left her body. And when she was gone, he began to scream.

He tried to bring her back. Of course he did. He spoke her name — her true name. He called to the love between them.

Nothing. She did not answer.

Her pattern had completed. Her name had run its course. There was nothing left to call.

So Lanre made a bargain with powers that should never have been bargained with. He found a way to bring Lyra back — but not to the world of the living.

She came to him, distant and cold. “You shouldn’t have done this.”

“I had to.”

“The bargain you’ve made is changing you, Lanre. Twisting you into something you never wanted to be.”

“I don’t care what I become.”

“Lanre.” Her last word, spoken with a love that broke his heart. “Let go.”

She vanished. And Lanre screamed again — not in grief this time, but in rage.

I realized I was gripping the arms of my chair. Bredon stood, walked to the pavilion’s edge.

“Would you like me to stop?” he asked quietly.

“No. Finish it.”

The power Lanre had claimed remade him from the inside out. His name unraveled, replaced by something that was not quite a name at all.

He became Haliax. Breath of Iax. Something that could not die. Something that could not forget. Something bound to the doors between worlds, guardian and prisoner both.

The destruction of the seven cities was not madness. It was purpose. Each city held something connected to the doors, to the prison that kept him from Lyra. He believed — or had been told by the Cthaeh — that if he broke these seals, he could finally reach her. Could finally rest.

One by one, the cities fell. Belen. Antus. Vaeret. All of them burned. And when it was done, Haliax stood at the center of a world that had been broken. Not triumphant. Not satisfied.

Merely present.

The survivors built new cities. Established orders and secrets. Some became the Amyr. And Haliax gathered his own — the Chandrian, the Seven, bound to him, to each other, to the doors that could not open and could not quite stay closed.

Through it all, Haliax waited. Searched for a way to open the doors. To find Lyra at last.

The story ended as the last light faded from the pavilion.

I sat in darkness, the weight of three thousand years pressing down on me.

“Lanre wasn’t evil.”

“No. He was broken. Grief-mad. Manipulated by forces that saw his pain and used it.” Bredon’s voice was tired. “The greatest villain in history is a man who loved too much.”

“And Cinder?”

“Cinder is different.” The old man’s voice hardened. “Cinder was never about love. He was about power from the beginning. A Shaper who saw in Lanre’s transformation a template — a way to become something more than mortal. He’s been working toward his own ascension ever since, using Haliax’s obsession as cover.”

“And the song Denna is singing —”

“Is Cinder’s tool. Not Haliax’s. The original Chandrian want the doors open so Haliax can find his dead wife. Cinder wants them open so he can harvest the energy and complete his transformation.” Bredon stood, his bones creaking. “Different goals. Both catastrophic.”

“You said the truth could strengthen the seals.”

“If enough people believe it.” He handed me the journal. “Tell the story I just told you. Make it into a song. Not one that makes Lanre a hero or a monster. Make him human. Make people pity him instead of worship him.”

“Why would that help?”

“Because gods need worship. But humans just need understanding.” He moved toward the exit. “Make Lanre human again — make people see him as a man who failed rather than a god who fell — and Cinder’s ascension can’t use that belief. The energy goes nowhere.”

He left me alone with the darkness and the journal and the echo of a story that had broken the world.

I opened the book. And I began to read.