Work Text:
Hey. Wanna learn something? Course you do. It’s me, and it’s you, and you’ve got nothing better to do.
Ever heard of a puddler? Course you haven’t. They don’t exist anymore— it’s a word and a term out of circulation. Words die, you know. They have lifespans of their own, born by circumstance and dying by neglect. Every once in a while, a writer or an archaeologist or a linguist or someone like me will bring them back, and everyone will utter it for a few months or so, and it’ll live only to die again. Except, not exactly die. Things of ink and paper don’t die, strictly speaking. Of course, if you ask them, they’d rather just die. But they don’t. No, they wither, and fade, and shrivel up into something old and rotting. Like a house long abandoned, doors shut and windows locked, holding darkness within. And they ask themselves through clenched teeth, what did I do wrong?
A puddler was a metalworker. They took pig iron— crude stuff from the earth itself, infested with carbon— and they beat it into wrought iron. It was their job to remove the flaws in it, to carve out the impurities and make something strong and beautiful out of it. And it killed them.
As it turns out, when you work in a blazing hot furnace, melting it down and purifying it, you release a lot of toxic chemicals into the air. Same reason why the term mad hatter became so popular— the human brain doesn’t like being exposed to heavy metals. They actually used to treat furs with mercury, and the result was more or less the same. Constant exposure to fumes leads to them being… different. Unstable and sometimes dangerous. And then dead. But then they took those furs and irons and tools and they made clothes and cities and works of art out of them. Humanity entered a new age, one of steel and electricity and enlightenment.
The puddlers and the hatters and the heroes are all dead.
But the world is a better place.
And barely anyone even remembers the word. No one even knows their names, not even me. Their sacrifice, their pain, and no one knows their names. Everyone remembers Hercules and Achilles, but do you know who made their weapons? Do you recall the names of those who fought and died alongside them? Of course you don’t. Because they didn’t matter, not to the narrative. And so they didn’t matter to you.
They aren’t real, after all. Not to you.
If you ask a historian or an archaeologist, they’ll tell you that there was a war between the greeks and someone, but not nearly as grand or long as the one written in the Iliad. That Achilles was probably a bunch of people merged into one, that the Trojan Horse was a fable, and that the intervention of the gods was just explaining the weather and dumb luck. They’ve found ruins, and broken shields, and shattered swords. But nothing to prove that any of it was real, real in the way that matters.
I have heard the rage of Achilles. I have witnessed the war between the gods, with the corpses dragging behind the chariots and the countless bodies strung about along the rivers. I saw the heavens split open and the mountains shake, and I saw her bleed out in the fields. My role was that of Cassandra, and I bore witness to it all.
I will remember their names.
Will you?