Valknut Season (version 2)

Intro

Forge is cold at four, ash sitting in the grate

Three triangles I hammer into every iron plate

Daddy called it a season, said the mine picks when it's ready

I just make the markers so the names don't come out heavy

Verse

Coal town sky the color of a bruise that never heals

Sixteen men went under 'fore the whistle sealed the deal

I was ten years old counting boots outside my door

Learned to read the silence better than the scripture from before

Daddy took the tongs at twelve, I took 'em at fourteen

Said a smith who fears the fire never gets the iron clean

Every winter mine floods deep, they call the season by its name

Valknut season, when the mountain settles every claim

I don't mine the coal no more, I mark the ones it took

Three triangles locked together, no need to read a book

Odin's own design for the warriors laid to rest

I stamp it on their headstones, cold iron on the chest

Momma kept a candle lit for every man gone missing

Now I keep a ledger where the names are cold and listing

Forty plates last autumn, sixty-one the year before

Every hammer strike's a prayer nobody's praying for

Chorus

It's valknut season, mountain calling in its debt

Every name I carve is one I'll never let forget

Three knots for the fallen, one for the ones who stayed

Iron don't lie about the price that gets paid

Verse

Twenty years at the forge, my knuckles look like bark

Hands that shaped a hundred markers holding back the dark

Mine closed in the spring, said the coal ran dry at last

But the widows still walk past my shop and touch the iron of the past

Boy comes by on Tuesdays, wants to learn the trade

Asks me why I keep the same design, never get it changed

Told him every knot's a door, three ways a man can fall

Courage, or the sacrifice, or silence — hall still takes them all

I've buried more good men than the church has buried saints

Every eulogy's a hammer strike, no different, no restraint

Black lung took my brother slower than the roof it took the rest

Coughed his final breath out clutching iron on his chest

I don't blame the