The Magpie | Of Ash and Iron

From the chronicles of the Order of the Tamed Flame
Entry the first. They take no vows and keep no lamps, yet the roads east belong to them more than to us. Where our brothers carry the flame sealed in glass and lead, the freeblades carry what they have cut from the dead gods themselves — bone, chitin, ichor. Brother Osmund calls it desecration. Brother Osmund has also never crossed the ash fields without one of them walking ahead.

Entry the second. I asked one of them — the crossbow-woman, the one the villagers call Magpie — why she stitches trophies of the beasts onto her own shoulders. She said a thing I have chosen not to repeat to the novices: that iron axe forgets, but bone remembers. She laughed then, and I confess I do not know, to this day, whether it was a joke.

Entry the third. The Order pays them in silver, salt, and silence. Silver they spend. Salt they carry east, though no one will say to whom, or to what. And the silence — that, I think, is the true wage. We do not ask what they were before the Crucible opened. Not one of them has ever asked us for absolution.