What's in a name?


Once, the name rang like tempered silver,
bright with promise, keen as drawn steel.
It was spoken with a hand to the heart,
a vow unbroken,
a shield lifted for the voiceless.

Chivalry lived in its syllables.
Peace walked its streets unafraid.
To name the city was to recall
care given freely,
justice carried even when it cut the bearer.

Centuries taught the name how to mean something.

Then came the vote, quiet as a blade slid home.
Banners changed.
The metal dulled.
Steel learned new work.

The city did not fall,
it turned.

Empathy became efficiency.
Understanding became calculation.
The old virtues were folded away,
kept like heirlooms no longer worn,
too costly, too slow, too soft
for an empire that measures worth in conquest.

Yet the name remained.

It still speaks of silver where there is none.
It still promises shelter where there is command.
It still calls to those who remember
what it once meant to stand beneath its walls
and believe they would be protected.

Hope lingers there, stubborn and aching,
mistaking memory for momentum,
waiting for a return that will not come.

That is the cruelty of keeping the name.
Not betrayal, but repetition.
A wound reopened every time it is spoken,
asking the past to answer for a present
that no longer listens.

If the city will not be what it was,
then let it be honest.
Let it take a name that fits its new shadow,
its hunger,
its allegiance.

Spare the faithful the pain of recognition.
Let the old name rest,
untouched,
unchanged,
belonging only to what it once was,
and the hearts of those who remember.

Because some names are not banners,
they are graves,
and to keep calling them aloud
is to pretend the dead might still rise.

Penned by my hand on the 11th of Aeguary, in the year 993 AF.