Chapter 7: The Man Who Buried the Blade

From Echoes Beneath Ohio
by Esi Noire

They called him “the Sleeper,” though his name was Josiah Green.

No one knew where he came from, not truly. He appeared in Springfield in the spring of 1885, wearing boots a century too new and speaking in phrases no one in the township could place. He rented a room behind the old mill, paid in silver dollars that didn’t shine quite right.

He never caused trouble. But the land around him did.

Crops wilted where he walked. Clocks slowed in his presence. And strange symbols were found etched into the sides of trees days after he passed through, always the same shape: a curved blade, a circle of roots, three dots above like falling stars.

Josiah kept a journal. It was found decades later by a man cleaning out a crawlspace under the former Clay Street Baptist Church. The leather was intact. The pages, thin and gold-edged, untouched by mold. On the first page: one sentence.

“If you are reading this, I failed.”

The entries were fragmented, out of order, as if time had collapsed between them.

May 9, 1885: The blade won’t stay buried.

May 12: I think the garden can hold it, if the dreams don’t reach the girl.

May 13: They’ve seen me. One has violet eyes.

May 17: I hear the Cerulean song in the river again. It knows I’m not from here.

May 20: The Bound One isn’t bound. Just waiting.

In the final entry, Josiah wrote a warning:

“Springfield isn’t the beginning. It’s the stitch. The echo line coils here.

The blade remembers every hand that held it. Including mine.”

No one knew what to make of it, until Dr. Anaya Toussaint unearthed the blade a hundred and fifty years later. Or until Elias Reed heard the forgotten frequency. Or until Zola began to speak in sleep and symbols.

Josiah Green was not the first to travel this path.

But he may have been the first to try and stop it.