The Names in the Blade

 

    The forge of Thorn sat at the edge of Duskwater Hollow. Its hearth had long gone dark. It had been silent since the night Egran Thorn was found burned to cinders, yet untouched by smoke. People whispered that the fire had judged him. That he’d not died by flame, but by verdict.
    Rolan Mair, last of the Thorn apprentices, returned to that place out of necessity, not faith. The noble from Briarhelm had requested a ceremonial blade. Something rare. Something singular. And though Rolan’s tools had rusted, the knowledge remained—nestled beneath scarred palms and the marrow-memory of iron.
    He didn’t remember acquiring the metal. It was simply there one morning, lying beside the anvil. Heavy. Black. Slightly warm.
    He forged for three days. Ate nothing. Slept only in slivers of dusk. The blade revealed itself by degrees. Each strike seemed less his than the hammer’s, and when the sword was quenched, it did not hiss. It sighed.
    A name appeared on the blade. Faint at first, then rising like breath on glass: ANSEL CREET
    Rolan knew little of him. A trapper. A recluse. A man who muttered to his snares and lived outside town boundaries.
    Two days later, the constable announced Ansel’s death. Found in his cabin, cleanly opened from collarbone to hip. No sign of robbery. No weapon left behind. Just the scent of iron in the air and a look on the corpse’s face as if, in his final moment, he had understood.
    Rolan couldn’t stop staring at the sword.
    It gleamed. Innocent. The name was gone.
    In its place: KETTA MORREN
    This name struck deeper. Ketta was a midwife, yes, but also an old-soul healer. She was beloved. Revered. Feared.
    Rolan visited her that evening, sword wrapped in canvas.
    He confessed what he could. About Ansel. About the blade.
    Ketta listened with that faraway stillness she always wore when speaking with the dying. After a long silence, she said only, “Some debts find a blade when law forgets how to weigh them.”
    He demanded she explain.
    She refused.
    That night, he guarded her home. But sometime before dawn, he must have drifted. When he woke, the door stood ajar.
    She lay on her bed, face peaceful, chest opened like a surgeon’s diagram. No pain in her features. No fear.
    When Roland returned to the forge, the sword had returned.
    Roland read the name on it: EGRAN THORN
    The name of his old master. The one who taught him the language of flame and steel, and also of silence. But Egran had already perished years ago in a fire.
    Roland felt a chill as a pattern became evident to him. The sword did not kill at random. It punished secrets. It hunted those whose sins had gone unspoken, unjudged, unweighed by any court but conscience.
    Rolan made a visit to the town’s Hall of Records. Quietly. Carefully.
    Ansel Creet, the trapper, had once been accused years ago of making a young girl from the marshlands disappear. Charges dropped. No proof. Just a pair of small shoes found near his cabin. The case was forgotten.
    Ketta Morren had presided over stillbirths, yes—but one of those births, Rolan found, had been a child of mixed blood, hidden from the father’s wealthy family. The mother died. No record of where the child’s remains had gone. But whispers suggested that Ketta’s herbs had silenced the child’s first breath.
    As for Egran Thorn—Rolan recalled the girl who came to the forge once, bruises hidden beneath soot on her face. An apprentice, briefly. Gone overnight. Egran claimed she’d run away. No one questioned it.
    Roland returned to the forge and discovered another name bled onto the sword alongside Egran's name: ROLAN MAIR
    What had he done?
    He searched himself, not for acts, but for silences. For the night he saw Egran dragging a bloodied apron out behind the forge. For the time Ketta whispered a lullaby over a bundle too still to be sleeping. For the afternoon he caught Ansel cleaning a bone that looked terribly small for a deer.
    He had spoken nothing. Stopped nothing.
    He had forged the silence.
    Now the blade had returned to him—not as a punishment, but as an invitation.
    That night, they heard hammering again. Measured. Final.
    In the silence of the next morning, one of the townspeople entered. The forge was cold, and Roland was nowhere to be found. The blade stood upright in the anvil. There was only a single line, engraved in deeper steel: RECKONING AWAITS
    Below it, another name formed: READER