Heroism usually comes with applause. In "Paladin," published under the name Ancient Artifact, the applause never arrives. The poem sets out what a hero is for, and the answer is unsettling: to be spent. Its central idea is that heroism and martyrdom are not two separate fates but one design, seen from the beginning and from the end. The people the poem calls "they" are given a purpose before they are given a choice.
The grammar makes this clear. Both opening lines use the passive: "they were made to be heroes," "they were made to be martyrs." Nobody is named as the maker, and the heroes are never the ones who decide. Their lives are lists of infinitives (to fight, to sacrifice, to love, to dull, to bend, to die), a string of jobs handed down rather than ambitions chosen. Even the word "love" is turned into a duty: they must "love mankind as a whole." That phrase is deliberately large and cold. Loving humanity as a whole is easy to admire and almost impossible to feel, because no single face is in it. The poem never mentions a friend, a home, or a person being saved.
The imagery makes the same point from another angle. The first stanza gives these figures bodies of metal, "steel teeth and iron bones." They sound like weapons or armour, and the second stanza confirms it by borrowing the language of tools. They "dull over time the way old and worn things do" and "bend and warp from overuse." A blade loses its edge, and metal fatigues and twists. Calling a hero a worn-out object is bleakly practical. It suggests that society treats its protectors as equipment, valuable while they hold an edge and disposable once they lose it. The title adds to this. "Paladin" calls up the holy knight of legend and fantasy, a figure bound by oath, and the poem strips the glamour from that figure and leaves only the oath and the wear.
The sound of the poem follows the same split. There is no rhyme and no regular metre, and every line begins in lowercase, as if the poem were speaking quietly. In the first stanza the consonants are hard and stressed: "steel teeth and iron bones" clatters like metal on metal. In the second the sounds soften and slow down: "dull over time" drags on its long vowels and liquid l's, so the line itself seems to lose its edge. The stanzas are also built in parallel, four lines each, each opening with a colon and an identical clause. That symmetry makes the second stanza read as the first one's shadow. Everything promised in the first is paid for in the second.
One small shift of wording carries a lot. In the first stanza the heroes sacrifice "for the sake of others," a warm and human phrase. By the second they die "in the name of fate." The reason for the sacrifice has moved from people to an abstraction. Somewhere between the two stanzas the others have dropped out of sight, and what remains is destiny, which cannot be thanked or argued with.
The ending is only two lines, set apart like a held breath. "And they will;" ends on a semicolon, a mark that refuses to finish the thought, and then the sentence runs on: "until there is nothing left, they will give everything." The closing words, "nothing" and "everything," are opposites joined by the act of giving. The line can be read as tribute, since these figures hold nothing back. It can equally be read as accusation, since someone is taking everything. The poem does not say which, and that restraint is its most effective choice.
What makes "Paladin" worth reading is how much it fits into so few lines without raising its voice. It takes a familiar story, the noble hero who gives everything, and asks the question the story usually skips: who made them this way, and who benefits? The reader is left in an awkward position, admiring the sacrifice while being quietly implicated in it.