The debt of names

Every object, feeling, and person carries a True Name — the whole, uncut truth of it, buried beneath the worn-out words the rest of the world settles for: fear, iron, grief. Learn one, and you can command it completely. Speak it once, and it's gone — erased from everyone else's tongue, forever. He was born with a Scar: a crack in his sight that lets him glimpse exactly one True Name at a time, and only by surviving the raw, undiluted truth of the thing itself. Every Name he claims spreads the crack further across his skin, visible to any Name-user who looks — and burns a little more of that concept out of the world for good. He can't choose what he learns. He can't stockpile safely. And somewhere out there, a rival is racing toward consuming his own True Name — a power so absolute it erases him from every memory that ever held him, including his own. To stop him, our protagonist will have to fight with whatever he's survived, against things his power was never built to touch — with no Name left to save him if it isn't enough.