Thorn and the boundary between worlds
A curious tale of Bloody Shard Gate
by Isla Cobb
The keepers and the poachers who met at Bloody Shard Gate in December 1780, with staves and flails and one man who did not walk home, did not name the gate. The name was already old.
What that name does not record is Thorn.
This is not a full account of Thorn, in part because I do not have one, and in part because the partial accounts that I know of do not agree. Whether Thorn was understood to be a man, a spirit, or some other type of guardian, I cannot say.
What can be said, with reasonable confidence, is that Thorn kept, and maybe still keeps, the ancient boundary between what are now the parishes of Farnham and Tarrant Gunville.
The story, such as it survives, goes something like this.
There was a gate in the boundary even in the far off days before the land was settled by the first people to come to the Chase. It was not just a gate across the landscape, allowing passage from one side to the other; it was also a gate to a third place, often called the Elsewhere. Why a boundary between two parcels of the Chase should also open onto the Elsewhere is not a question any of my sources could answer.
In the long-ago depths of time something came through that gate, a visitor from beneath the ground and beyond the stars. The nature of this visitor is elusive, unnamed and never described.
Why it came is also not recorded. What is recorded in stories, passed down through word of mouth, is that Thorn met this visitor at the boundary, because that is where Thorn is, and Thorn does not have anywhere else to be.
Thorn was carrying his knife of flint, its edge sharper than steel, harder than frost.
Thorn's task was never to keep everything out. Boundaries of this kind are porous by design; things pass all ways, and mostly no harm comes of it other than a little oddness, strangeness. But Thorn was especially careful about the things that visit from beneath the earth and beyond the stars.
(This tale speaks of beneath the earth and beyond the stars in the same breath, as though those two places are somehow adjacent. That is a surprisingly sophisticated idea for what purports to be a rustic legend.)
Thorn felt that what this visitor intended was not to pass through but to stay.
The visitor is never described as wicked, demonic or monstrous. It may have been one, all or none of those things; the tale does not say. Nor does the tale explain how Thorn reaches his judgement. He simply knows.
All accounts agree that first he first challenged the visitor and ordered it to return whence it came. It would not. So he struck the visitor with his knife of flint. The knife broke the way flint breaks, into pieces that kept their own sharp edges even in ruin.
(Two of my three sources insist the visitor spoke before it was struck. They are so vague about what it said that I will not record it here).
The visitor came apart in a cloud of stars, small and bright and briefly visible even by daylight, going up and out and away from the gate in every direction.
Thorn, cut by the flying shards of his own shattered knife, remained standing but bleeding, and watched as the lights went out one at a time. Satisfied, he gathered up what he could of the broken knife and pressed the pieces into the ground around the gate, one by one, setting each one edge-up.
And some say the ground roundabout the gate for some way still turns up sharp flakes of flint, close to the surface, edge-up as if freshly placed.
Thorn has not been seen or heard of since.