📂 PLAIN TEXT TITLE FOR POST 13: Post 13: The Copper Baptism - 1885 (The Origin of the Mark) 📂 POST 13: THE COPPER BAPTISM

The Private Journals of James Kelsey

ENTRY NO. 109 // CHRISTMAS EVE, 1885

Durant and Powell didn't ask me. They told me. They said the railroad was "screaming" and that I was the only man whose nerves were steady enough to hold the conduit.

Laughing Crow stood in the shadows of the Nomad, clutching a bowl of rendered fat and crushed obsidian. He didn't look like a savior; he looked like a man preparing a body for a wake.

"You do not hold the rock, James," he warned. "You let the rock hold you. If you fight the vibration, your bones will turn to flour. If you embrace it, you will never be alone again."

They strapped my hand to the Master Keely Fork—a massive tuning rod of cold-forged copper. Then, they lowered the tip into the boiling mud of the primary vent.

I didn't feel the heat at first. I felt the sound. A violet lightning bolt shot up the copper rod and directly into my palm. My skin didn't burn; it fractaled. I watched as the white-hot light etched a star into my flesh, branching out like the roots of an ancient tree.

In that moment, the railroad vanished. The camp vanished. I saw the world as the Sentinels see it: a web of heat and pressure, a living lung that breathed in centuries and exhaled in eruptions.

I woke up three days later. The scar was permanent. The "Mark" was born. And the mountain was finally, terrifyingly, Quiet.

*** [End of Ledger Entry] ***

🖼️ IMAGE: THE FIRST BAPTISM (1885)