But every few decades, when the river ran low and the drowned bells of the lower city could be heard ringing on their own, a traveler would appear at the North Gate. Gray-eyed, soft-spoken, carrying no weapon but a long walking staff. They would ask for bread, listen to the news of the realm, and leave before dawn.

The name came to him on a windless night, carved into the base of an iron lamppost in the old quarter. Nesdurand . No surname. No date. Just seven letters, worn smooth by rain and the indifferent hands of strangers.

Some say it is a curse. Some say it is a promise. The children have a rhyme they chant when skipping stones across the black water: Nesdurand, Nesdurand, neither fire, nor sword, nor land. When the last lamp learns to stand, knock three times for Nesdurand. And somewhere, on a road that has no map, a lantern flickers — patiently, impossibly — waiting for the next time it is needed.

He whispered it aloud, and the alley seemed to hold its breath.

So: the one who endures beyond. Or, more grimly, the one who should not remain.

Nesdurand. It had the weight of a forgotten language — perhaps Old Corvantine, perhaps something older still. In the scholar’s dialect, nes meant “neither” or “beyond,” and durand echoed the word for endurance, or the slow hardening of stone under centuries of frost.

Nesdurand.