Black Carbon

For as long as the keep’s records named it, Black Carbon had been counted among the old blades whose runes no one could read.

That was the reason it had remained in the lower vault so long without inspiring more than occasional debate. The claymore was enormous, dark as quenched coal, and carved near the fuller with ancient inscriptions that every archivist agreed were significant and no scholar had ever managed to interpret. Generations of smiths had cleaned it, tested its edge, weighed its balance, and concluded the same thing: whatever power had once lived in the blade was dormant beyond recall. It was still dangerous in the ordinary way a great claymore is dangerous, but its magic belonged to the lost arts of the ancients, and lost arts have a way of becoming museum pieces in the minds of practical men.

That was why Captain Ser Vann insisted on displaying it at the inspection table rather than leaving it boxed. He was not reckless in the theatrical sense. He did not believe he was awakening anything. He believed, as many did, that the old runes were decorative remains of a craft no one living could restore. If the blade drew attention, it was because of its sheer physical presence: broad, heavy, and black-matte in a way steel should not be, as though the forge smoke had never truly left it. The inscriptions along its face were shallow and angular, cut with a precision that made them look less engraved than embedded. They gave the sword an air of withheld meaning, but nothing about them suggested urgency.

I was there because I kept the armory ledgers and because old relics are easiest to misunderstand in a room full of confident men. The quartermaster laid the claymore across the padded stand, and Ser Vann asked for the resonance lamp—not to activate the blade, only to see whether any trace of enchantment still clung to it. That was common enough practice with ancient relics. A live enchantment usually answered with shimmer, heat, or vibration. Dead runes answered with nothing at all.

The quartermaster passed the blue lamp slowly along the flat of the blade, and for a moment it seemed Black Carbon would behave exactly as expected. Then Ser Vann, impatient with the pace of the examination, reached over to rotate the sword toward the light. His thumb brushed across the runes near the guard just as the lamp passed over them.

Neither action would have mattered on its own.

Together, they did.

One of the inscriptions filled with red.

It was so narrow at first I thought the lamplight had reflected oddly in the cut. Then the glow deepened and spread into the neighboring marks with the swift, branching certainty of embers racing through dry roots. The ancient lines along the blade lit one by one, not evenly, but in a pattern—some inner sequence at last finding the conditions it had been waiting for. No one moved for the span of a breath. We were all still trapped in the comforting assumption that dormant things remain dormant.

Then the red reached the center of the blade, and the steel itself answered.

The runes did not merely glow. Twisted red channels spread out from them into the dark metal, branching in jagged veins that made the claymore look suddenly alive with something buried too long. They crawled toward the edge, down toward the pommel, and outward into the very air around the weapon, where thin splinters of crimson shimmered like cracks in glass no one else could see yet everyone felt. The room changed with that light. The temperature dropped first, and then every shadow near the inspection stand pulled subtly out of shape.

The quartermaster stumbled backward and dropped the lamp. Ser Vann snatched his hand away, but too late. One of the bright red branches leapt from the rune-line to his wrist like a hooked wire. He swore and tried to shake it free, but the thing had no physical form to cast off. It spread under the skin in fine twisting lines, climbing his forearm as though tracing the paths of his veins with cruel interest.

No one had intended to activate it. That was the terror of it.

For years, perhaps centuries, Black Carbon had lain silent because no one knew the proper sequence. Now, by accident, a living hand on the guard and the passing resonance flame had answered some ancient requirement hidden in the script. The blade had not been dead at all. It had only been waiting for the right mistake.

“Don’t touch him,” I shouted, because two guards were already moving toward the captain.

One ignored me. He grabbed Ser Vann’s shoulder to steady him just as the captain’s hand seized the hilt in reflexive pain. The claymore rose from the stand with him.

What burst from the sword then was not flame. The red branching thickened through the steel and tore outward into space itself in crooked, splintering lines that hung for an instant in the air like fractures in a mirror. They vanished almost at once, but not before one of them passed across the corner of the inspection table. The far edge of the table slid soundlessly to the floor, cleanly severed. No cut. No impact. Just sudden absence where wood had been.

The room broke into chaos.

Ser Vann stared at the claymore as though he could not understand why he was holding it, yet every attempt to let go only made the red deepen in his hand. His face had gone pale and rigid. The branching marks were visible now at his throat, faint beneath the skin. He turned too quickly toward the nearest movement, and a second red fracture snapped into being from the blade’s edge, lancing across the flagstones in a jagged line before disappearing. The stones did not crack immediately. A heartbeat later, three of them separated with tiny grinding sounds and collapsed into the gap below.

That ended any thought of rushing him.

The armory went still except for Ser Vann’s breathing, which had become harsh and shallow. The sword seemed to react to every spike of panic around it. When someone shouted, the runes flared brighter. When one guard lifted his spear, another fracture began to gather along the blade’s spine. The corruption was feeding on agitation, drawing force from the very violence it provoked.

I backed toward the open ledger and found the older notes attached to the weapon’s record. The earliest entry called the runes unreadable. A later hand had added a smaller warning: Do not introduce catalytic flame to engraved sequence while in contact with a conductor. That was all. Some dead scholar, generations too late to help himself, had understood one sliver of the mechanism and left it buried in the paperwork.

“Everyone be still,” I said, more quietly this time. “No shouting. No weapons raised.”

It felt absurd to issue calm like an order in a room where space itself had begun to split, but the alternative was worse. Slowly, reluctantly, the others obeyed. With each moment of stillness, the red along the blade stopped spreading so quickly. It did not recede, but it ceased accelerating. Ser Vann sagged under the claymore’s weight, not because the weapon had grown heavier, but because whatever the corruption had awakened in him was exhausting him as fast as it consumed the room.

He dropped to one knee.

The runes pulsed once, then held.

I took the tar-cloth from the transport crate, wrapped it around my arm, and approached from his blind side. Even then I did not think I was saving the captain. I thought only of smothering the script, of interrupting whatever sequence had been completed. When I cast the cloth over the runes, the reaction was immediate. The red lines writhed beneath the fabric, and the air gave a low, ugly shiver, as if something had been denied a door it had just forced open.

Three men helped me wrench the hilt from Ser Vann’s hand. We got the blade back into the iron transport box and sealed it with ash-salt before anyone trusted themselves to breathe normally again.

Afterward, the armory floor bore the evidence in a dozen places: a table corner gone clean away, three separated stones, a split in the wall no wider than a thread yet deep enough to swallow the tip of a knife. Ser Vann survived, though his palm healed with red whorled scars that no physician could explain. He refused ever to touch another relic. As for the claymore, its record now begins with a different sentence in my own hand.

The runes are not dead.

We simply did not know how to wake them.