Ranger August

Day 7: Dagger

The first time Will held a Ranger's dagger, he was disappointed by how light it felt. It was nothing compared to the grand swords he thought he'd once hold as a knight.

For weeks, he had imagined the moment.

He had imagined ceremony. Importance. Something grand enough to mark the dividing line between the orphan nobody wanted and the apprentice he had fought so hard to become.

Instead, Halt simply handed him the knife.

The forest around them was quiet except for birdsong and the distant murmur of water moving over stone from the creek nearby. Sunlight filtered through the leaves overhead, scattering patches of gold across the ground.

Will turned the dagger over in his hand.

It was smaller than he'd expected. Lighter too, yet perfectly balanced.

Halt watched him with the expressionless patience he reserved for apprentices making discoveries they believed were unique.

"Well?" he asked.

Will frowned, realizing he'd been silent for a few solid minutes and his mentor expected an answer from him. Of course, it was always hard to tell when Halt wanted words and when he wanted silence. The man was impossible to read. Will hoped that'd become an easier task as he advanced in his apprenticeship.

"I thought it'd be heavier," he said simply.

For a moment, Halt merely stared at him.

Then he reached into his cloak and produced a second knife--the broad-bladed saxe every Ranger carried.

He handed that one over as well.

"The weight comes later."

At fifteen, Will assumed he meant practice.

Years later, he would realize what exactly Halt meant by that.

The daggers became part of him somehow.

The throwing knife rested at his belt so often that reaching for it became instinctive. The saxe accompanied him everywhere, serving as a tool more often than a weapon.

They cut through rope, prepared meals, sharpened stakes, whittled branches, opened letters. Performed a hundred small tasks that nobody would care to think about a ranger using it for.

Will carried them through his apprenticeship and into manhood, and gradually the steel began to gather memories.

The daggers aged beside him, as did the hand that carried them.

The first life he saved with a dagger was not particularly dramatic.

There was no fanfare about it, just a frightened farmer pinned beneath a collapsed wagon while a horse panicked itself into exhaustion.

The saxe sliced through tangled harnesses.

The horse bolted.

The farmer lived.

That night, sitting beside the fire, Will remembered feeling absurdly pleased with himself. Not because he had done anything truly remarkable. But because, for the first time, he had felt useful.

The dagger had weighed almost nothing; Will had wielded it as such.

The first life he took with it was different.

He remembered the man's face.

Years later, he still remembered it.

Not every detail, not the exact shape of his nose or the color of his eyes.

Just enough.

Enough to know he had been real. Enough to remember the surprise.

The fear. The pain.

The sudden absence of anything on that face afterward.

Will cleaned the blood from the blade three separate times that evening.

The dagger felt heavier then.

The Skandians took the daggers along with everything else Will possessed.

The loss should have mattered less than it did.

His freedom was gone. His dignity, his pride. His bow and his oak leaf. They were all gone. Stripped from him in a matter of days. tt

His future seemed to have vanished entirely.

Yet there were moments during those dark months when his hand would drift automatically toward his belt before remembering there was nothing there.

He had never realized how much comfort could reside in familiar weight.

When Halt finally found him and began the long process of dragging him back from the edge of himself, the replacement daggers came once again without ceremony.

Much like the first pair.

Halt simply presented them to him in those Skandian woods.

"Thought you'd need these again," he had said quietly.

Will stared.

The leather smelled new. The steel gleamed.

For a moment, he could not bring himself to touch them.

Because these were not the daggers of an apprentice.

Those had belonged to a boy.

This pair belonged to the man who remained.

When he finally picked them up, they felt heavier than the originals ever had.

The years passed.

The daggers remained.

His friends married.

He married.

His mentor aged.

Conflict came and went as it always had.

The knives became witnesses. They watched him become a Ranger. They grew experienced right alongside him. They were there when Will was promoted to a senior Ranger.

The realization disturbed him more than most injuries ever had.

It seemed that one morning, he was asking Halt for advice. The next, people had begun asking him.

He lost the throwing knife once.

A mission gone wrong near the border

By the time the fighting ended, the dagger was gone.

Will spent nearly an hour searching for it afterward. Horace found this hysterical.

"You can get another knife, Will."

"It won't be the same!"

"It would be exactly the same!"

"No!"

Horace studied him.

Then, to his credit, stopped laughing.

Because it wasn't the steel.

It was never the steel.

It was every year attached to it. Every mile. Every mistake. Every triumph.

The knife contained pieces of his life no smith could forge and no replacement could replicate.

When he finally found it buried in the mud, the relief felt ridiculous and entirely justified.

Many years later, he placed a dagger into another apprentice's hand.

The gesture felt strangely familiar.

The apprentice's eyes widened.

Exactly as Will's once had.

The same excitement.

The same certainty that the future contained nothing but adventure.

Will nearly laughed.

Instead, he merely nodded.

Maddie turned the blade over in wonder.

"It feels light."

Will looked away before the young girl could see the anguish in his eyes.

"Give it time."

One quiet evening, Will sat outside the cabin as the sun settled beyond the trees. Feeling a peace settle over him. The sort of peace that Rangers rarely trusted, even after decades of service. He was sharpening his saxe knife with a precision and care not many men possessed in his age.

The world had seemed to grow softer with age. Or perhaps he had, who's to tell.

Beside him, Halt occupied another chair.

Older now. Considerably grayer, with wrinkles and a walking cane.

But no less irritating.

Neither man spoke for a long while.

The silence rested comfortably between them, the way it always had, filled only by the sounds of stone on steel.

Eventually, Halt glanced toward the dagger resting across Will's knees.

The same replacement dagger.

Older than some kingdoms.

Maintained so carefully that the steel still caught the light.

"Heavy now, isn't it?"

Will looked down at the dagger.

At the countless memories hidden within scratches nobody else would ever notice. The people it had saved, the people it had failed to save. The lives it had taken, the years it represented.

The boy who had once believed its weight could be measured in ounces.

He smiled.

"Yeah."

Neither elaborated.

They didn't need to.

1) you probably didn't, people with all presentations of tic disorders down to textbook examples are constantly fake claimed with made up rules and statistics. (And if it was online 90% time this person is just someone on Tiktok that has one too many echolalia tics from another person on Tiktok with TS)

2) the only thing this does is show me you don't know anyone with Tourette except someone accused of being a faker which shows me you don't think you know or respect anyone with TS.

3) this makes me immediately think you consider people with TS to be automatically deceitful and that you're way more likely to fake claim me, too.

My usual response to put some good in the world is "oh, thank you for sharing. It's really common for people with Tourette to get fake claimed. People get really into it and it's one of the reasons a lot of people with diagnosed Tourette Syndrome get harassed in public and online. There's honestly no good way to tell if someone is faking it, so I try to just let people be. If they're actually faking Tourette syndrome it sounds like they've got a lot going on anyways."

I have switched to using Startpage.com and vastly prefer it. for one thing, instead of displaying an "AI summary" at the top of the search results (unless you turn it off, yes I know), it displays the first paragraph of the Wikipedia article, with link, whenever it finds one that's relevant.

also a waaayyyyy better sense of design than duckduckgo

Search Engines

Infinity Search is an alternative search engine with a special focus on privacy

DuckDuckGo is a popular search engine for those who value their privacy and are put off by the thought of their every query being tracked and logged. Uses bangs, ![site] for in-page search (sells your data to microsoft and draws from fucking bing)

WolframAlpha is a privately owned search engine that allows you to “compute expert-level answers using Wolfram’s breakthrough algorithms, knowledgebase, and AI technology.” A data search engine.

Boardreader is a search engine for forums and message boards. It allows you to search forums and then filter down results by date and language.

Based in France, Qwant is a privacy-based search engine that won’t record your searches or use your personal details for advertising. Uses “&” as a bang search.

Another privacy-based search engine is Search Encrypt, which uses local encryption to ensure that users’ identifiable information cannot be tracked. Metasearch across multiple engines. 

Offering unbiased results from several sources, SearX is a metasearch engine that aims to present a free, decentralized view of the internet. Can be self-hosted. 

Gibiru’s tagline is “Unfiltered private search” and that’s exactly what it offers. Requires AnonymoX Firefox add-on for privacy. 

Disconnect allows you to conduct anonymous searches through a search engine of your choice.

Swisscows provides fully encrypted searches to protect your privacy and security. Built-in violence/porn filter cannot be overridden. 

MetaGer offers “Privacy Protected Search & Find” through its anonymised search. A plugin will allow it to be made a default.

Gigablast is a private search engine that indexes millions of websites and servers real-time information without tracking your data, keeping you hidden from marketers and spammers. Variety of filtration and refinement options for searching. 

Oscobo is a search engine that protects your privacy while you search the web. By not using any third-party tools or scripts, your data is protected from hacking and misuse. Has a Chrome extension to allow use in toolbar. 

https://search.marginalia.nu/ an independent DIY search engine that focuses on non-commercial content, and attempts to show you sites you perhaps weren't aware of in favor of the sort of sites you probably already knew existed. Use old-school searching rather than query-based for the best results. 

https://www.mojeek.com/ 

https://wiby.me/ - It’s goal is to index as many personalized websites as possible, and NOT commercial sites. 

https://4get.ca/ it works a lot like SearX, but honestly better. It doesn’t have its own index, but pulls from many others. I think it’s the best for research, since it allows you to search for answers from different indexes, is easy to configure, add free, and avoids censorship as much as it can.

https://www.searchenginemap.com/ for more on how search engines relate to each other.

https://yep.com/ is a crawler

https://www.etools.ch/ retrieves from Google, Mojeek, Bing, and Yandex, like Searx

https://www.dogpile.com/ 

https://searxng.org/ (next gen Searx)

https://luxxle.com/ - possibly conservative?

https://presearch.com/ - good for academic?

https://kagi.com/smallweb - free/randomised Kagi.

Other Searchers

www.refseek.com - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.

www.worldcat.org - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.

https://link.springer.com - access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.

www.bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.

http://repec.org - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.

www.science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.

i- um…