The Nameless
The Nameless of the Name Bound are beings who have managed what the zone forbids: they have hidden their True Names. In a place where a being’s name floats above it in glowing letters and anyone who speaks it can command it, they move unseen and unnamed, as spies and thieves of other names. The Thieves of Tongue and the Silencers are of their number. They are not the Nameless of the Silence, a different kind with the same name.
Appearance
A Nameless is hard to see and harder to describe afterwards. It is a person-shaped gap in the glow of the corridors, cloaked in shadow that clings like cloth, with no letters floating over its head where every other being’s name hangs. Up close there may be a face under the shadow, grey and forgettable. It moves silently over the sigils of the floor without lighting them. The only smell near one is of sealing wax and dust.
Habitat and Range
They haunt the corridors and the shelves of scrolls and tablets, the doors sealed with names, and the edges of every gathering. A Name Bound holds some, always fewer than its Scribes would like.
Behaviour and Temperament
The Nameless watch, listen, and take. They steal names from the Scribes' records and from the Bound, and sell, trade, or use them. They are patient, wary, and trust no one, since anyone who learned what they hide could command them. They avoid the Scribes and speak to visitors only to bargain, and their bargains are made in false names.
Abilities
They have no True Name visible in the zone, so they cannot be commanded by it, and the zone’s laws against masks and disguises do not expose them. They pass unseen in shadow and silence, and they know how names are hidden, a knowledge the zone can teach and they sometimes sell.
Life Cycle
Some Nameless are believed to have been born with fluid or unstable identities, and so had no fixed name to hide; others hid one at great cost. Whether a Nameless can ever be named again is not known.
Uses and Dangers
A visitor who wins back a stolen name often does it by dealing with the Nameless. A visitor who speaks their own name aloud may find a Nameless has heard it.
Lore and Belief
Outside the zone, the tale of the Nameless becomes the old warning against giving a stranger your true name, and many peoples keep a use-name for strangers. The belief that a name gives power is far older than any Name Bound and only partly right: the law holds inside the zone.
Bounty-takers say the hardest quarry on Caeldon is a thief who has bought a Nameless secret, and the tale of the outlaw no lord could name in a sentence, and so could never hang, is told in every bounty-hunters' inn.