Before Time, when even the notion of dawn or dusk had not yet been dreamed, there were forges in the dark beyond thought where the first hands shaped will into steel. From a single dying star and the spilled blood of a god-thing the Loomers called Fate, five blades were wrought: the Midnight Dagger, a blade of velvet shadow that drank the outline of form and could make a man move unseen through the fold of night; the Blood Moon Dagger, serrated with a chill that hummed like battle-thirst and made the bearer’s strength bloom at the price of a hunger for combat; the Blue Moon Dagger, cold as comet-ice, woven with the music of tides and prophecy, letting its wounded rise to see futures and unbind old magics; the Light Sun Dagger, bright and thin as a shard of morning, a healer and purifier that could sing heat into life and smite corruption into ash; and the Earth Sun Dagger, heavy and warm like buried iron, seeded with root-spell and stone-blood to bend soil, granite and the slow passing of time. They were not given but bound—each blade kept part of the Loomers’ bargain, a portion of their essence sealed into a cross-shaped sigil that would brand any who survived one of the daggers’ wounds; the cross would bloom upon the eye, a mark in a color answering the blade and a conduit for the terrible gifts the dagger leaked into flesh. So it is told that to be stabbed and to live is to be remade: a midnight-black cross that hides you beneath other people’s shadows, a gluing crimson that floods muscle and daring, an azure cross that opens vision to tides of knowledge, a gold flare that mends and commands light, and a green-brown sigil that grounds and rends earth as if you were a walking fault. They waited, secret and patient, locked in caverns of pre-history and memory, singing in case anyone foolish or brave enough should come to claim them and change the shape of the unfolding world.