A common theme in fantasy is the idea that names have power, and knowing someone's true name gives you leverage over them. The world I want to create explores that by having governments that use census data to enforce somewhat totalitarian regimes. They can track you with it and restrict your actions should they deem it fit.
Dissenters try and escape this control by travelling to other cities or continents where their names aren't known, but it's a near universal practice. Anyone not on record is treated with suspicion - the government line is that if they haven't done anything wrong, why are they running? - and penalise people communing with these unknowns, so whether they want to or not, they tend to end up as part of the criminal element.
This is where my protagonist comes in. He's nameless, for a reason I haven't quite nailed down yet. I'm leaning towards his mother being a mute which would be cause enough for people to shun her, either dying in childbirth or due to fatigue from fleeing some antagonistic element. He's raised by a rural-ish couple who keep him safe and happy until census time rolls around.
Here's where it starts getting a bit fuzzy for me. I like the idea that they send him away with some provisions before the official arrives, with the intent that he returns when it's all clear. Something goes wrong and they're taken in for "harboring malcontents" or something similar and taken to the capital. He follows them there at great difficulty and manages to get in contact somehow, where he decides to sever ties to keep them from coming to harm.
Inevitably, he ends up in the seedier parts of town, where the inhabitants are quick to find uses for a nameless local. Over the years he becomes something of a prime commodity due to his ability to blend in unlike the foreigners, lending a respectable local face to subversive ventures. He becomes a confident, capable young man.
However, since he hit puberty he's been hearing voices; faintly at first, but growing clearer and more insistent as he ages. They promise him all sorts and eventually one finally hits the one thing that he's always wanted - it says says it could tell him his real name. This eventually leads to him infiltrating the Archive where all the names are stored and ultimately releasing a horror of some description.
It turns out that while the government uses names to control, it also uses those names to protect from these destructive outside elements. This knowledge is kept secret simply because they know that should it become public then there'll always be power-hungry individuals who'll take the risk. It now falls to our hero to set right the damage he's done...
I'm really surprised with how fleshed out this idea seems to me, relative to many of my others. Gap fillers were occurring to me even as I typed, which is nice.
One big hurdle for me is trying to keep the government sufficiently sympathetic before the twist, which I think I can accomplish by having a love interest who's part of it. She can either be the daughter of a law enforcer following in her father's footsteps, or an Archivist cleric.
Both work, and I can use them as his means to get into the Archive. They need to be recurring characters beforehand, but he steps up his seduction towards the end to achieve his goal, directed by the voice. It also creates some convenient conflict should this idea ever go further, which I really hope it does.
