Chaper 1. An Encounter, Pieces of the Knife
Somewhere, hidden in the snow and darkness, were pieces of a knife.
This was not our world. In the valley a blizzard was raging. The time was what we would call noon, and above the clouds the sun must have been shining at its brightest. In another world, another time, people would be bathing in the sunlight, walking in the street, drinking in pubs, enjoying their lunch.
All these were, however, absent to the man who was walking through the valley. A blizzard was raging; the noon sky, which would have been bright, was shielded from his eyes by the thick snow and clouds, such that he had to turn on his torchlight to see three paces ahead of him.
Fortune did not favour this man, as anyone who was there to hear him cursing under his breath would agree. He dared not, and indeed could not, curse too loudly in such a hail, but he cursed, nonetheless. He cursed the townspeople who threw him out in fear of his experiments. He cursed this bloody storm. He cursed the cold and the wind. He cursed the undescribdable ruins he passed. He cursed his experiments, to forge a sword to sever souls. He cursed his backpack, containing everything of his experiments weighing him down like a solid rock, although if anyone even suggested that he threw it away he would have chased after him, preferbly with the soul-severing sword. He cursed the bad luck which had plagued him for years, which had seemed, briefly, to leave him when he achieved a breakthrough in his experiments, only to strike again ruthlessly when he discovered that he lacked the most important component, and when the townspeople discovered what he was doing.
Ferro Herrera was in a very foul mood indeed. He kicked out, against his better judgement, at the snow in front of him. The snow splashed out into the darkness, giving Ferro nothing but more anger, pain in his feet, and regret at strength wasted.
Then his torch shone over something black in the otherwise speckless snow. Something that looked like metal but did not glitter in the light, a dull, lead grey shade. He bent down in curiosity as the storm intensified, and he saw that there were more of them, dull metal pieces, scattered and buried inside the snow.
He gathered up the pieces, and tried to conjure up an image of what the whole object had been like. Pieces of rosewood inlaid with golden wires, metallic splinters, grey and dull, but which an closer look seem to give a swirl of cloudy colours – a rainbow of sublety, at once red and blue and yellow and green and purple and black and white and yet grey. Ferro flipped one of them over, and saw a silvery colour, seperated from the grey rainbow by an edge so keep that it could have cut the snow flakes into uncountable pieces.
Then it dawned on him what it was.
“It couldn't be...”
An ancient legend, so ancient that most had completely forgotten it instead of treating it as a children's story. An ancient legend that he had found only in a dusty old tomb, that, according to its previous owner, dated to thousands of years ago.
Two edges, two sides. One a grey swirl of rainbow, one silvery. Two edges, equally keen; one able to sever all that the eye could see, and one able to sever all that is left. The knife which allowed, so the legend told, gods to travel between heaven and hell, between this world and the next. The knife which links souls and worlds and lives.
The Subtle Knife.
The blizzard subsided slightly, and under the scarf covering his mouth, Ferro stopped swearing and smiled.
Perhaps, just perhaps, fortune had not abandoned him after all.
He carefully searched once more in the snow, making sure that he had left no pieces of the knife behind, then carefully tucked the pieces into his overcoat's pocket, and journeyed on through the valley and snow to his goal. A cavern where his forge lies.
A cavern where he, and the rest of the world – no, all the worlds – would be reforged.
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