The Name Eater

Once upon a time, there lived a mighty prince of the fair folk, whose power was almost unmatched amongst his people. But like all who wield great power, it could be taken from him by any who learned his true name - be that person the greatest sorcerer or the meanest peasant. 
Thus, he strove to keep his name a secret from the world. He burned any book that mentioned him, and he tore the memories from the skulls of those who knew him. 
But names are a vital part of all intelligent creatures, and cannot be destroyed that easily.
It came to pass that a wizard unravelled the name of the prince with magic and enslaved him for an age, leeching away his power. When the faerie prince eventually broke free, he slew the wizard, and vowed he would never again become slave to another being; not to beast, man, nor fae. 
And so, he did something that had never been done before. A thing with consequences that none could possibly fathom. 
He ate his own name, erasing it from the world. 
That should have been the end of him. The other fair folk knew this should be so, and indeed he vanished from the known realms of reality and unreality. The memory of him faded, until no creature remembered the prince who had eaten his name. 
But he was not gone. He had simply changed. 
And freed from the laws that bound his kind, he became far more monstrously powerful. He ate the names of all he desired, until even the old gods and the new cowered from the unremembered thing that stalked and devoured them with not even a thought. 
...
I can no longer remember how I came to be eaten. Once your name has been consumed, your memories begin to fade. Soon, nothing is left, only echoing whispers and meaningless, disjointed images.
Perhaps I was a poet or an artist, great enough to attract the Eater’s attention, my name spreading across the land until he tasted it on the wind and came for me. Or mayhap I was a despot, ruling over some pre-feudal kingdom with sword and flame, my name used to terrify children into doing their parents’ bidding.
The Eater’s tastes have grown more refined over the ages. He has become a true connoisseur of names. Sometimes, he will start with an entrée of bawdy party-goers, popping them into his scribbly maw like a greedy child with a trove of candied chestnuts. Then he’ll move on to the main course; perhaps a foreign dignitary, their name fat with deeds, richly marinaded in anecdotes and accolades. Having savoured every last syllable of that name, he will seek out some sweet, innocent, spun-toffee thing for dessert. He may even reveal to the child his true form, so that her essence is drizzled with fear. Terror is delicious to him, a sharp and salty counterpoint to the sugary confection of a young soul.
But the Eater doesn’t always finish his meals. Sometimes he leaves the barest morsel uneaten, and takes it back with him to his lair. There, he may consume it later as a snack, or bind it to his service, to tend to his sprawling domain.
My fate was the latter. 
There were some three dozen of us, living within his private world, all hollow creatures clinging to the final fragments of ourselves. We toiled at various menial tasks; trimming the wicked, thorny hedges of the garden maze, or polishing the strangely filigreed silver rails of the staircase that led up and down the mad towers of the Eater’s castle.
When you have no name, no memories, it’s easy to be put to work. Lacking even the most basic instincts about who you are, you simply cling to any purpose you are given. And so, when the Eater’s Chamberlain told me that my destiny was to scrub the tiled floors of the great empty ballrooms, I eagerly accepted the role, and threw myself into the work.
As time ground on and I became aware of the others, I sought out their company. Their presence was a gentle breath across the ember of curiosity deep inside me, still faintly glowing. When I passed the gardeners, I would pause to exchange a few words before moving on to my next task. Upon the stairs, I would speak softly to the woman polishing the sharp and delicate barbs of the silver balustrades, not yet aware enough to wonder whom or what she had been.
I knew I shouldn’t be doing such things, but the flake of my name that Eater hadn’t consumed swirled rebellious and inquisitive. I wonder, now, if the crumb he had left of me was not quite small enough to steal all that I had been.
As unnameable swathes of time inexorably passed in the Eater’s domain, I grew more certain of myself and began to explore the giddy corridors of the twisted castle, finding things that sounded echoes of recollection.
The Chamberlain discovered me on one such excursion, and scolded me for straying, flaying me with razor words. A tall man, with silvered hair and an ageless face, he dressed like a medieval footman but snapped orders like a general, expecting to be instantly obeyed. But with my waxing awareness, I beheld a grey aura of loneliness that gloved him like a second skin, and I wondered just how long he had been there.
We met more often after that, as I engineered excuses for our paths to cross. With painfully slow tenacity, empathy won him over, and he became the closest thing I had to a friend.
As our connection grew, it was he who told me the dreadful origins of our master.
 
“Come with me,” the Chamberlain finally announced, after what seemed like eons into my service.
He led the way into an unknown part of the Eater’s keep, until we stood before a vast set of iron doors. They were wrought of all the letters of every alphabet, jumbled together into chaotic, amalgam layers.
“Our master requires a new larder,” the Chamberlain explained, his pale eyes hooded, “and you are best suited for this task.”
“What is a larder?”
“It is a place where one stores uneaten food.”
“Why would he need such a thing?” I wondered.
Licking his thin lips nervously, my companion glanced at the massive doors,
“Sometimes when the master dines, he sees something he wishes to eat later. When he desires this, he places those names inside his larder.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Soon you will.”
With a complicated gesture from his long fingers, the heavy doors opened soundlessly,
“All you need to do is follow him, nothing else. Do not try to speak with him nor touch him, simply obey without question.”
And with that, my new service as the Eater’s larder began.
 
I thought perhaps I would recognise the Eater, that some scrap of memory would shake loose upon our meeting. This was the creature had taken all but a crumb of my essence and consumed everything else that I was; in this twisted way, we were one. But when I stepped through those doors and into his private chambers, nothing was familiar.
Twice as tall as the Chamberlain and slender as a spider, there he stood, his nightmare shadow stretched across the vaulted roof by the flickering gaslights of his parlour. Two girls darted around him, attendant satellites plying needle and thread, dutifully sewing up numerous rips in his patchwork nobleman’s clothes of orange, red and black. Brittle golden hair curled from his elongated skull, ringlets fat and ragged like a tumbled library of ancient parchment scrolls. Behind his terrible head, the broken aerials of two pointed ears twisted up and backwards, longer than my arms. Hooked through their waxen flesh were dozens of iron rings, from which hung the wrought letters of lost languages he had eaten into oblivion with his endless appetite. The metal clashed and jangled as he moved, rows of gnashing symbol-teeth, always churning.
And his face. Mercy, his face.
Yellow as old vellum, it seethed with black characters, a maelstrom of alphabetic chaos. Perhaps those scribbles of insanity drew more dense where eyes and mouth should be, but I cannot truly tell you, since staring into his face for any length of time caused my stomach and mind to rebel.
With a finger akin to an ink-dipped bone he beckoned me, then we passed back through the iron doors and into a different world.
 
I believe my first trip back to the mortal realm must have been during the late 1800s, because I recall steam trains and top hats aplenty. I don’t think people truly perceived me as a person, but neither did they see me as a ghost. Unable to grasp a proper name for me, their minds stuttered and skipped across my presence, like I was no more than an uninteresting piece of furniture.
The Eater would stand amidst the flow of dense crowds, people instinctively avoiding the space where he was, even though they couldn’t truly see him. Arms hanging at his sides, stained fingers twitching, his chaos-scrawled head swayed back and forth, scenting the air for a name to eat.
All I had to do was follow him, and so I did, not daring to stray. On some basal level, I knew that to wander would be futile. We were indeed connected; having eaten most of me already, no matter where I went he would find me, and then he could finish his meal, should he so choose.
And although it must be difficult for you to comprehend, even this half-existence was preferable to the colourless "unlife" that awaited me should he make that choice.
He did not use me, on those first few outings. I simply watched as he stalked down his prey, tore their names from them with his greedy spider fingers and then sucked their essence into the black tangle of his maw. They faded fast after that, those without names. People forgot them, and they forgot themselves. They turned grey, then transparent, wandering aimlessly, forever wondering who and what they were.
The first name that the Eater put inside me was that of a child, a girl of fourteen, her short life a miserable grind of poverty. Why he wanted her, I don’t know. As he pushed her name inside me, I knew her life intimately and completely, from her wretched, squalling birth to her equally wretched unmaking at the Eater’s hands. To someone whose only memories were of slavery in an alien realm, that poor girl’s brief, mean existence was a potent drug. Her experiences seared my mind with heady, unfamiliar spice and colour.
He ate her sometime after we returned to his domain. I missed her with unrequited intensity when she was gone, the sense of loss so profound that I wept for the first time during my long service. The Chamberlain found me curled in a hedgerow on the edge of the Eater’s realm, my cheeks stiff with the salt of tears.
“I am sorry, my friend,” he said, a new kind of sorrow muting his voice. “Serving as the Eater’s larder is the hardest lot of all.”
 
Sometimes I held many names, sometimes I held none. During the chaos of the first and second World Wars, I was bloated as a ripening corpse. The Eater was particularly animated with hunger then, seeking out unique flavours that could only be born from such an awesome confluence of human strife. He stalked the beaches of Normandy and the trenches of Chunuk Bair, stuffing name after name inside me for later consumption. I seethed with the lives of young men, torn from their homes by the promise of glory and high adventure, to see only bullets and blood, dysentery and death. 
And it was then that I learned the secret histories of the world; those truths unwritten by the dreadful hunger of the Name Eater. You do not know that the instigator of that second war was not Adolf Hitler. The catalyst was unimaginably darker, a far more terrible figurehead, who had already won the first World War, grinding the Allies into the mud of the battlefields and burning all of London to the ground. But once his enormous name was eaten, reality itself adapted, shifting to fill the gaping void left by his erasure. The history you find so unpalatable was a bland custard to the Eater, glutted on violence you cannot even fathom. 
Perhaps this idea excites you, that the Eater saved the world from an even more horrific fate. 
Perhaps you’re even cheering for him now, as the antihero of my story? 
Then let me tell you about a young woman, a scientist, who discovered a cure for the most common forms of cancer in the 1950s. But the beacon of a mind that brilliant, the whiff of a name that potent, drew the Eater like a magnet. She was devoured before she could tell anyone, let alone be presented the accolades she deserved, and banish the spectre of that disease forever. 
Good and bad, evil and altruistic, he gobbles them all up, changing the shape of your existence with every bite. Without you ever knowing a thing. 
If you’ve ever felt like the world seems strangely stagnant, like mediocrity so often triumphs, you may just have smelled his breath. 
...
 
As omnipotent as he seems, the Eater’s one great problem has always been that he cannot be everywhere at once. As such, a great many piquant dishes have slipped through his spidery fingers. They died before he could reach them, or simply changed, curdling before he could taste them as he wanted them. In times past, names changed far more slowly, beholden to the speed at which news could travel. But as television – and later the internet – caused this process to metastasize beyond his control, he added a new duty to my purpose: to seek out desirable names and take them on his behalf.
Having eaten his own name, he could not fully be part of this world, could not navigate its fast-changing subtleties. He is less a person than an alien force of nature; existing outside the natural laws of our universe, he is therefore as strange to it as it is to him.
But I still had a scrap of my name, a grain of my humanity, and so I could comprehend this new world. With that understanding, and with the power of new purpose he granted me, I sought out names I knew he would find particularly palatable, then ripped them from their owners. I would hunt out rising Youtube stars and end them at the height of their popularity, diminishing their entire existence to a palate cleanser between the courses of the elaborate banquets I created for my master. It was me, not the Eater, who hastened a whole new wave of mediocrity, hacking down generations of tall poppies, allowing their lesser cousins to flourish in light they had not earned.
You will think me a traitor to my own people, to all of you. But I made my mistake in the name of a plan, an idea born from the legend of the Eater’s origin. I thought that if I crafted a truly toxic dish of names, blended them in some way that would be deadly to him, I could kill the Name Eater.
I scoured online middens and real ones, seeking out the most poisonous personalities. I quaffed them down like goblets brimming with bile. Carrying them inside me made me sick to my core, and as I added more and more of them, I started to lose who I was. That tiny, hardy flake of my original self was in danger of dissolving in the acidic slurry. So to balance the evil I was brewing inside me, I took tiny nibbles from the polar opposites of those toxic souls. I hunted rare herbs; good people, virtuous people who had conquered their human hurts and hatreds, and I would snatch a scrap of their syllables to add to myself.
When it came time to serve my dish, it was magnificent, a seething, greasy roil of hate, so black with vitriol and spite that it burned as it spewed from me. But my master sucked down every last drop, greedy and eager, his scribbled tongue scouring my heart. I feared he tasted something far different to what my mortal palate had divined.
When he was done, I held my breath and ached. But his huge, cryptic head swung toward me, nodded once, and his gesture was simple to interpret. More. Find me more.
I had failed.
 
Emptied of the darkness I had fermented inside me for so long, I felt profoundly changed. At first, this worried me. Surely a vessel cannot house that much evil without becoming stained, and I wondered if I had sabotaged myself; that the malevolent ingredients had seeped their dark oils into me and corrupted my very desires, ruining my own recipe.
But I could still feel those floating snippets of goodness within me, those honey crumbs of altruism snicked away from the good-folk. Those fragments sought each other out and coalesced like settling syrup, forming something very new and strange. As I slaved and strove to fulfil the desires of my master, I collected more and more bright morsels. They began to fold themselves into something pure and wonderful, the sweet antithesis of my cocktail of loathing. And when the glossy coating of them began to harden around the fragment of me that fluttered at my core, I felt a profound shock.
This new confection was a name.
I had not felt joy for what seemed a thousand years. But nor had I felt such terror, for now I truly had something to lose. Nothing in the Eater’s world should have a name, and when he returned from his feeding, he would smell this glorious fresh thing upon me instantly.
I stumbled through the twisting halls, shouting for the Chamberlain. When he appeared, every line of his body reluctant to approach me, I knew that he already saw my secret; my new name was burned into my being and shone from me like a star.
“And so it is. Another larder becomes corrupted,” he sighed, his lambent eyes brimming with resignation.
“Help me,” I begged, “help me to escape.”
“If I were to let you leave, he would eat my name, my unfortunate friend.”
“Can he be killed? Is there a name that will end his existence, should he eat it?”
“No.”
Whether he was telling me the truth or not, I didn’t know. The Chamberlain had been one of the Eater’s original retainers – even before the prince descended into madness – and his loyalty was unquestionable.
But he had given away a secret of his own, something I had not known until that moment.
The Chamberlain’s name tore from his flesh, clinging to my hands like a sticky seed as I rent it from his body. He whimpered once, then grew oddly still, the colour already beginning to fade from his edges.
Inside me, that seed burst out its juices. His vast history oozed across the ages, staining a tapestry of loneliness and terror; just as much a prisoner of the Eater as the rest of us. But there was no time to linger on his story; I needed the keys to the keep.
With the Chamberlain’s components suffusing his knowledge into my being, the shape of the keys came easily to mind, as did many other secrets of the Eater’s domain. I found myself in front of the iron doors in a blink of an eye, and opening them was so very easy I could not believe I had once thought it complex. As if they had shaped it a hundred times over, my fingers formed the command to ease the vast portal open, and I dived through into the mortal world, even as I felt the Eater pass in the opposite direction.
For one horrific instant, I knew with dreadful certainty that he had scented my new name as he passed.
 
He is unquestionably coming for me. My name is deliciously unique, never spoken before in any world, a name forged from the things I have suffered, and tempered with that rarest ingredient; pure human goodness. But the Eater’s power also fizzes in my blood, and that is a gift he cannot take back. It is as much a part of me as the precious syllables of my newly minted soul. 
With that power, I pull newer names into me, blending them with mine, changing my scent and my flavour to mask my trail; rendering down the desperate hopelessness of a homeless addict, gargling its bitter oil with the giddy, crisp joy of a new mother. 
How long I can keep this up, I do not know. The weight of all the names I have taken is beginning to drag me down, their syllables whisper and chatter like accusations in my long ears, accumulating heavy in the corners of my head. My own name spins ever longer, more complicated with each stolen, gossamer weft woven into my spirit. It is hard to remember, and harder to pronounce. But its power grows with it. 
If I can just swallow enough names, if I can gather enough of humanity inside me, I may be able to match the power of the Eater – perhaps even surpass it. All I must do is stay alive long enough to find all the delicious names that I need, and then I can do the unthinkable. 
I will eat the Eater. 
There is a tiny, niggling part of me that insists I have lost who I was, that the purity of my original name is gone, the fragment dissolved. 
But I won’t listen. I can’t listen. I cannot take the chance that I am wrong. 
There are only two conclusions to this tale; either I become the Eater, or I become the eaten. 
When I come for you, when I take your name in the night and leave all that you were to fade into unbeing, it is for a greater good. 
Or should I drop a crumb of you from my chin, then perhaps you may be fortunate enough to serve me more directly. 
I think I’m going to need a much bigger larder. 
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