The Wound

You were forged before you had a name. Bright steel, dark iron, thrown together in the fire. The steel went soft. The iron went white, holding the fire longer than memory. The hammer fell. Rose. Fell. The bright metal screamed - a high, thinning into hiss. The dark vein swallowed the sound. Each fold blurred the line between what you chose and what chose you. Each blow the hammer dealt, you would one day return. When you cooled, you smelled the fusion: metal in metal, self in self. You searched for the seam. Found only spine.

The Path

For years, you polish the blade. The dark vein refuses the light. It runs through you – mute, patient, yours whether you claim it or not. You want to be the part that catches light, not the weight that sits in your marrow like debt unpaid. You grind twice as long to prove you're more than what you came from. The wheel whines. Then, the blow, the one that should shatter you. You brace for the snap, wait for the pieces to fall. They don't. The shock screams down the polished edge. Hits the dark vein. Stops. The dark vein swallows what the edge could not. Your thumb finds the ridge where polish meets iron, and the truth reveals itself: The edge is for the cut. The spine is for the cost.

The Shadow

The blade can deny its spine. The Sheathed Son cannot bear the wheel. He watched his father disappear into the grinding – wear himself away chasing a perfect edge. Ηands first, then wrists, then the rest. Until only edge remained, and no one left to hold it. The son understood: the proving never ends. One morning, he says enough. He looks at the rust on his own palms and refuses to polish. Refuses to cut. Refuses to be tested at all. He becomes a scabbard for corrosion, an edge that never learnt itself, safe and useless beneath the rot. They find him years later. Blade pristine, never drawn. The iron he feared never betrayed him. It never had the chance. ⧫ The Glassblade cannot bear the map on the metal. She sees her mother in the dark vein – the flinch, the swallowed words. She wants to be clean. She takes herself to the wheel to grind the pattern away, wanting mirror, not history. She succeeds. Flawless, all gleam, no spine. She hangs on the wall to be admired, terrified that any tremor will show how thin she's become. The first true blow shatters her into a thousand brilliant fragments. Each catches the light as it falls. Each believes, for one falling instant, that it is still the whole sword.

The Cut