What "Traditional Knife" are ya totin' today?

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Eye Witness

Ted Barlow stood alone at the lip of the quarry, his boots planted in the fine glittering dust that blew across the hills like ground bone. The wind moaned through the deep crevices below, carrying with it the low groan of something old and restless. Behind him, the company shuttle had already disappeared into the ashen horizon. He was here by choice. At least, that's what he told himself.

They called this place the Ramshead Vein. It wasn't a vein of ore, not in the usual sense. Here, they didn't dig for metal or coal. They mined horn. Ram’s horn. It grew deep beneath the crust, coiled like fossils, ancient and warm to the touch. The foremen said it was alive in some way, still pulsing faintly even after extraction. It made no sense to Ted, but sense had begun to feel like a luxury he left behind a long time ago.

The pocket knife he carried had a mirror-polished blade and a handle smooth as driftwood, its scales made from the same ram's horn he now stood above. Ted had cut himself the first time he held the knife. Not on the blade. On the horn. It had seemingly flexed beneath his thumb and split his skin like a smile. Ted had laughed at his carelessness back then.

He wasn’t laughing now.

The air shimmered with heat, or something like it, and below in the pit, the veins of horn pulsed visibly under the surface, like roots made of cartilage and regret. The machinery used to extract the horn sat still today, paused after the last crew disappeared without a trace three days ago. Their radios still clicked now and then, strange low rhythms like breathing. No voices.

Ted had come to inspect the site. That was his official task. Unofficially, he was here because of the knife. It had changed since he arrived. The blade no longer reflected the world around it. Instead, it showed another world entirely. He could only glimpse it when he tilted the blade just so. A place of steel forests and creatures shaped like swords. Their limbs coiled and branched, moving in slow arcs, grinding against one another in a ballet of tension. The ground beneath them pulsed in familiar rhythms. Not roots of cartilage and regret this time, but welds of alloy and memory. No sky. Just a vast dome of brass.

The horn of the handle had begun to warm as well. It squirmed slightly in his grip, like it remembered something he did not.

On the second night, the steel creatures spoke. Not in words but in pressure and weight. He felt them pressing into his dreams, pulling his mind toward that other world. They weren’t malicious. Just curious. Curious about the man who held one of their dead. But curiosity cuts too.

He knew now. The horn wasn't just mined. It was harvested. And steel was not forged. It was born. Shaped by pressure and by purpose. Blade-beings. Handle-things. This world and that one, inextricably bound. One fed the other.

By the fourth day, Ted had stopped calling for evac. He no longer needed to.

Ted Barlow was the eye witness now. That was the role the knife had carved for him. To watch the passage between worlds. To record the births of blades and the deaths of men. To remember what others had chosen to forget.

And when he turned the knife just right, he could see himself there too. Standing in the steel grove. Watching. Waiting.

The horn in his hand pulsed again.

It was time.


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