4141.224 · August 12, 1821 AD
Iron That Hurts to Remember
Some things can't be drawn from memory. Not because you've forgotten—because the lines refuse to hold still on paper. Nathaniel Blackburn knows this. He forged them for weeks, symbols that hurt to look at, patterns his hands shaped but his mind can't grasp. Now he sits shackled in the stables, scarred hands trembling, carrying testimony that will sound like madness. A convict's word against a respectable citizen. Tales of voices that shouldn't exist. And truth no one wants to hear.
Grey dawn finds Broadmoor walking to the stables where bad blood waits. Nathaniel Blackburn—convict, blacksmith, known troublemaker—quarrelled violently with William two days before the disappearance. About stolen iron, they say. About weapons for uprising.
But the blacksmith has been asking to speak with the constable since the morning after William vanished. Asking through channels that move slowly in colonial hierarchies. Asking with urgency the household tried to delay.
Now he sits in the furthest stall, wrists bound, blue eyes burning with intelligence his chains cannot diminish. Twenty-four years old, powerfully built, scarred from violence that sent him here. The kind of witness whose testimony courts dismiss before hearing.
Yet his hands tremble when he speaks of what William commissioned. When he tries to explain patterns that slip from memory like water. When he describes the night he delivered finished pieces and heard what he shouldn't have heard.
Some testimony sounds like madness. Some witnesses have every reason to lie. But Nathaniel's fear is genuine—the kind that comes from encountering something beyond human understanding and living to regret the knowledge.
The question isn't whether he's telling truth. It's whether truth this impossible can be believed.
