Hopping Celestial Fox

“Mom!” I yelled in despair, dislodging the ruby seed I’d kept hidden under my tongue. I quickly scrambled to catch it and curled my fist around it in a feeble attempt to hide it.

Cradence didn’t react other than looking at me, but I had the distinct feeling that he was doing the equivalent of raising an eyebrow.

“You can’t… You can’t just stay with him…”

“It’s okay, honey,” Mom assured me. “It’s not like I’m going away forever, right?”

“But… I just…” I still had a bad feeling about this.

“This crystal isn’t the only item you need from me, is it?” Cradence cut in as he walked to another corner of the room and began rummaging again. This time, he pulled out an a dark wooden staff that felt oddly familiar.

“That’s…”

“The Pandemia,” Cradence ‘talked’ over Casey. “Once used to spread a deadly disease throughout an entire nation by a twisted necromancer.”

My eyes widened in horror.

Huh?! Why would we need… Hold on…

“I have since modified it after it came into my possession, and now it’s capable of spreading things other than deadly disease.”

The dragon then attached the divine crystal on top of the staff and the staff almost seemed to grip it of its own will.

Oh… Now I understood. The plan was to use the staff to spread the crystal’s effect to cure everyone of the zombie plague.

But…

“What do you want… in exchange for the staff?” Casey asked, vary.

The dragon stared at Casey and suddenly the atmosphere felt tense again. Casey stared back unflinchingly. After a few moments of the staring contest, the dragon finally spoke.

“Your unconditional help to prevent the Ragnarok.”

 Casey seemed to relax and so I did as well.

“That’s fine. We were going to help as much as possible anyway,” she said.

“I want you to swear an oath,” Cradence said, not having relaxed himself.

Casey tensed again.

“An oath…? You don’t mean…”

“No, I don’t mean a soul contract. I doubt it would even work on the likes of you. Not to mention, I’m not exactly fond of these methods either.”

A soul contract?

I didn’t like the sound of that.

Casey frowned and pursed her lips.

“So we just… say that we swear to help?”

“Indeed,” Cradence confirmed but seemed a little miffed. “It is not as binding as I would have liked, but it is better than nothing.”

“Okay… In that case.” Casey took a deep breath, locked eyes with Cradence, and put a hand on her chest. “I, Cassandra Warren, hereby swear to help Cradence Crown and his order of the Truth Seekers prevent the Ragnarok to the best of my ability.”

I stared at Casey. Had something happened when she’d said her name? Something about it just…  felt odd.

Cradence then turned to me, his gaze expectant.

I stopped for a second and thought about what we were promising here. Of course, I had no intention of letting this world be destroyed by the Ragnarok, but was it necessary to make a promise like that?

Something about it just felt…

“Renee?”

I blinked.

“Umm, didn’t you already make the oath? Do we all need to do it…?”

The dragon’s eyes narrowed.

“Yes. You especially.”

I pursed my lips. I tried to think of any excuses… but found out that I couldn’t think of any, other than having this bad feeling.

I pushed through the feeling, closed my eyes, put a hand on my chest like Casey had, and recalled the words she had said. I opened my mouth and repeated them, replacing her name with mine.

When I said my name, though… I felt odd. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, but I almost felt like something unpleasant had happened. Regardless, though, I continued and finished the sentence before opening my eyes.

Everyone was staring at me in pure shock, their eyes wide open. Even the dragon.

I blinked.

“Uh, something wrong…?”

“Uhh… You sounded… a little funky when you said your name.”

I stared back at Frank.

“Was that… your true name?” Elyssa asked.

“Huh?! What do you mean?”

Cradence did his usual dragon huff.

“It was like Seeker arts speech, except exponentially more complex by several orders of magnitude. It was also dynamic instead of being static. I’m having trouble understanding it despite it being pure information.”

I stared at him, uncomprehending.

What were they all talking about? Hadn’t I just said my name…?

Hold on… What exactly had I said? Was it ‘Renee Chrona’? Yes… No… No, it wasn’t… Not quite. It was… something more than that. Something much more all-encompassing.

I suddenly recalled the piece of paper from the announcement board in RLO and tried to remember what was written on it. It still felt difficult to make heads or tails of it… but somehow, I knew that I’d just said exactly the same thing as whatever was written on that paper.

That… was my true name. Part of me still felt silly calling it that, but there just wasn’t a better way to describe it.

I felt uneasy now. Giving out my true name like this… was really bad. I wasn’t quite sure why, but I felt like I’d made a mistake.

Another question was… How had I even done that? I couldn’t even understand it myself, so how? Was it something to do with the oath? Had… the damn dragon tricked me?

My head spun around and I glared at Cradence. It was minute, but I could have sworn he flinched. 

“That was… my true name,” I informed him. “You tricked me.”

“I did not!” he denied, relaying his feeling of distress. “You are the first true god-like beings I have ever met! I had no idea mere words hold power for you!”

I continued glaring at him.

Was he lying? Was he telling the truth? I didn’t know. But I couldn’t let this stand. I still didn’t quite understand why, but knowing my true name was a massive deal. Bigger than even dying would be. Somehow.

And now this damn dragon knew it. The others knew it too, but I trusted them a whole lot more, not to mention, they couldn’t use seeker arts to decipher it, so they weren’t a danger to me even if they wanted to be.

But this dragon was different. He could spend a few years trying to understand my true name using his knowledge of seeker arts and then…

…

I had sworn an oath to him and I didn’t want to break it. But the oath said nothing about leaving him alive–

“Renee!” A yell and a hand on my shoulder shook me out of my trance.

I blinked, noticing the dragon backed into the corner of the room, looking at me in genuine fear. Then I turned and looked at my Mom, who had a hand on my shoulder and was looking at me in concern.

Just then, I noticed something else. A portal. Another portal that hadn’t been there before. This one had a white rim and was rapidly growing smaller. Before I could react in any way, it shrunk into non-existence and vanished as if it had never been there.

I blinked in surprise.

“Renee, what happened? What… did you do?” Mom asked.

I grimaced and looked at the dragon again.

“I… contemplated murder,” I said, making Cradence flinch. “And somehow accidentally created a temporary portal…?”

“I’m not certain, but–” Elyssa said, looking at me with wide eyes. “– I think you turned into your true form for a moment.”

Huh…

“You know…” Frank started, his eyes still wide. “I’m glad I chose to call you Hopping Celestial Fox. Feels very appropriate now.”

I stared at him.

“Why…?” I dared to ask.

“You looked… a little like the person in my dreams for a moment,” Mom explained.

Huh…

“I… see…”

I felt like several puzzle pieces were suddenly falling into place now. There were still many questions, like who the mysterious person was in the first place, but things were slowly starting to make more and more sense.

All because the dragon–

And then remembered why I’d been so furious a moment ago and glared at Cradence again. The dragon in question had lowered his head all the way down to the ground and was looking at me with wide eyes… like a damn puppy.

What the hell?

“You,” I addressed him. “Swear an oath to never divulge my true name to anyone and to never use your knowledge of it against me.”

He hesitated for just long enough for my frown to get deeper.

He then quickly opened his massive maw and actually spoke for the first time.

“I, Cradence Crown, hereby swear to never divulge Renee Chrona’s true name to anyone or use the knowledge of it against her in any capacity,” he quickly recited in a very deep gravelly voice.

I frowned. It didn’t quite have the same feeling to it as Casey’s oath had, but then again, he supposedly had nothing to do with the divine, so it was probably impossible to do the same thing we had done.

It still irked me, but it would have to do.

“Fine. Good enough.”