Ragnarök, Eternal Tragedy.
Chapter 135: Refused to Name

Chapter 135: Refused to Name

The road never waited.

Lionel didn’t walk with destination—he walked with necessity. One step after another, through heat that pressed against the back of his neck like guilt disguised as sun, through fields that had forgotten the shape of harvest, through borders guarded more by fear than soldiers.

He crossed into Druven’s Fold first—a cluster of trade posts stitched by debt and drought. The merchants there sold rust as copper, dreams as contracts. Lionel slept near grain sacks, one eye open, one hand wrapped around a stolen coin he never spent. When a guard kicked him aside for blocking the path to a diplomat, Lionel didn’t speak. He’d learned what silence bought. It wasn’t respect. It was invisibility. And sometimes invisibility was safer.

In Kaerlin’s Reach, they burned the poor beneath ceremony.

Lionel arrived with feet blistered raw, shirt torn from wind and days without food. The nobles laughed when he asked for work. "Look at the boy with blood on his soles," one remarked. Another tossed him half an apple—not whole. Just enough to show mercy without meaning it.

He found work shoveling waste beneath the banquet hall. Each night, the discarded bones and wine drippings became his ration. He ate quietly. Slept beneath the stables. And listened—always listened. To how power spoke. To how status moved. To what cruelty wore when it didn’t feel watched.

One night, a prince’s voice drifted through the floorboards.

"He’ll die by thirty," the prince said. "Or kill someone first."

Lionel didn’t sleep that night.

And he didn’t shovel the next morning.

In Barrowfen, they taught poverty to beg politely.

Lionel refused.

The priests there offered prayer in exchange for obedience. They told him pain was a blessing. That starvation was spiritual discipline. That hunger made the soul more receptive to divine truth. Lionel watched their rituals. Watched the gold trim on their robes. Watched the way their hands never trembled when holding bread meant for someone else.

When they asked him to kneel, he spat blood on the altar and left.

They let him go.

But they never forgot.

Virelle almost broke him.

The city gleamed with copper spires and market squares that sold silence as a luxury—private soundproof chambers where nobles could scream without being heard. Lionel found work hauling stone tiles to the upper tiers, paid one coin per six flights of stairs.

The work was unbearable.

The stares worse.

He watched children no older than Taviel stroll past him with polished sandals, pastries in both hands, no sense of what the world weighed.

Lionel’s hands bled.

His back cracked.

But he never collapsed.

The foreman once asked him, "Why don’t you scream when you fall?"

Lionel answered, "Because I haven’t fallen."

That night, they didn’t pay him.

He still came back the next day.

He kept moving.

From Lowryn’s Sorrow to Red Quay. From the frost-bitten slums of Ivarn to the burn-marked outskirts of Haelthorne. Every place carved something off him. Every kingdom branded a different scar.

But every scar wrote the same word into his chest:

Survive.

The mountain didn’t welcome him.

It watched.

The path to Draycliff Ridge was barely marked—spires of ice clawing into the clouds, old stone passageways fractured from landslides and time. No merchants rode here. No coin flowed freely. Just whispers of raiders, dead travelers, and wind that sounded too much like screaming when the moon angled low.

Lionel didn’t choose it.

His feet did.

After being chased out of Haelthorne for stabbing a city guard who tried to brand him, Lionel climbed until his breath frosted mid-air. His coat was stolen. His food pouch nearly empty. One blade. No sleep. And still—he kept going.

That’s where they found him.

The first was a man named Rorrick—broad shoulders, fox-fur armor, hands like bludgeons wrapped in twine. He didn’t speak when he spotted Lionel curled beneath a crumbling pine root. He threw him a strip of dried meat. Watched him eat. Then left.

The next day, they returned.

Six of them.

Weapons worn.

Eyes sharper than coins.

No uniforms. No colors. Just scars like signatures carved across exposed skin.

Rorrick asked no questions.

He tossed Lionel a shovel.

"Dig."

Lionel dug.

The ground was frozen.

It cracked.

Bled cold.

By sunset, he’d helped them bury a raider they’d lost to avalanche. No ceremony. Just shared silence.

That night, they gave him a blanket.

No words.

Just placement.

They didn’t trust him at first.

Mael, the youngest, barely seventeen, threatened to slit his throat if he touched her food stash. Varn, the tactician, moved maps whenever Lionel got too close. But slowly—hour by hour—his silence became familiar. His instinct for watching wind patterns earned nods. His ability to hear footsteps from steep angles got respect.

When he killed a skinner who tried to poison their water, they stopped calling him "lowlander."

They started calling him Grey Dust.

Not because of his clothes.

But because he stuck to everything.

And didn’t wash off easy.

Two winters passed.

Lionel learned how to fight in air thin enough to slice breath.

He learned to cook meat over coals shielded from snowfall.

He learned to gamble with broken dice and how to patch wounds with thread meant for bootlaces.

He learned that trust wasn’t given—it was traded, usually after blood.

Rorrick taught him to throw knives while blindfolded.

Mael taught him to move quiet through frost.

Varn taught him what routes guards patrolled based on sky shifts.

And Lionel—

He taught them how to survive without desperation.

One night, drunk on moonshine and victory after ambushing a convoy from Virelle, Rorrick patted Lionel’s shoulder and said:

"You’re not just part of this camp."

"You’re part of the mountain now."

Lionel didn’t answer.

But something inside him stopped running.

And started watching the road instead.

It didn’t happen all at once.

The mountaintop was silence before it was business, and blood before it was coin.

But as the smoke lines thickened from campfires turned into signal markers, and the hunting trails became trade corridors littered with stolen carts and redirected caravans, something shifted in the group—something intentional.

They began calling it work.

Robbery was the first language.

Clean hits. Targeted strikes. No children, no priests. That was the rule.

Until a convoy bound for Dragunov territory was intercepted—barrels marked with the crest of the southern family, crates sealed with chemical sigils Lionel couldn’t read. Varn cracked one open. White dust spilled onto the snow. No one asked what it was. They just knew it sold fast.

By the next moon cycle, Mael was trading crates from a hidden ledge in exchange for gold wrapped in Dragunov wax. No questions. No delay.

And soon the rules changed.

They weren’t just raiding.

They were trafficking.

Weapons stitched into farm equipment. Batches of synthetic opiates folded into sugar barrels. People, too—sometimes chained, sometimes threatened, sometimes bought out of their villages with promises they didn’t understand until too late.

Lionel watched.

Didn’t participate at first.

But the road had taught him something—

The loudest morality comes from the mouths of those who don’t need it to survive.

Rorrick led the deals.

Varn mapped the deliveries.

Mael negotiated terms.

And Lionel—

Lionel stood beside all of it.

Silent.

Until one day, a Dragunov courier arrived early, demanding payment in kind instead of coin.

Rorrick hesitated.

Lionel didn’t.

He struck first—clean, deliberate, efficient.

The Dragunov man bled out in the snow before his horse stopped breathing.

The mountain bandits gained a reputation that night.

Lionel earned a nickname no longer whispered—the One Who Doesn’t Blink.