Breadcrumbs, iron pens, and avian epigraphs

I've finally finished The Words of Them Which Have Slumbered. Two new themes are introduced near the end of this 169-page book: breadcrumbs and an iron pen.

On p. 133, we read that "a trail came they upon, as of bread crumb's lighted upon a dark forest lain," and some were "carried by those crumbs to a course directing to Eru-place." I understand from what Bill and others have said that these crumbs will become an important motif in the third book.

Then on p. 157, we read of an iron pen created from a shard of a broken sword made of meteoric iron:

so may iron of a star's fall cut, and of its material, be forged a sword, for cutting, and if broken, in time, of shards may be written, upon plates of brass, by that same iron's instrumentation, now in pen held to cut by strokes a tale

In the few pages between that reference and the end of the book, this iron pen is mentioned eight more times.

I then began the third book in the series, Words of Them Liberated, of which I have so far read only the table of contents and the page after, which has a short poem about birds as an epigraph:

and them not alone,

the birds might chatter, and sing,

of all the beauty, peace, resolute Abiding,

and make of that Void, chirp.

Another book I have just begun is When Women Were Birds by Terry Tempest Williams, which perhaps less surprisingly also begins -- just before the table of contents in this case -- with a short epigraph about birds (ellipses in the original):

Birds, birds...Behold them armed for action like daughters of the spirit...

    On the white page with infinite margins, the space they measure is all incantation.

--ST.-JOHN PERSE

Last night I happened to check YouTube and ended up listening to the Right Wing Coalition's latest, in which it is said that "Tucker [Carlson] wants to try and get everyone to follow his breadcrumbs."

I also finished rereading the Book of Isaiah yesterday -- I'm taking a little break from the Book of Mormon, which I have already gone through four times this year (some reading, some listening) -- and after a bit of hesitation as to what book of scripture to tackle next, I thought, well, why not just continue right on with Jeremiah? Maybe do all the prophetic books. I started last night and got as far as Chapter 17 today. That chapter begins, "The sin of Judah is written with a pen of iron" -- which was enough of a sync to make me stop reading and write this post. This is one of only two references to an iron pen in all of scripture. (The other is in Job. I'm actually noticing quite a lot of Job-like language so far in my present rereading of Jeremiah, which I hadn't really picked up on before.)

The three themes listed in this post's title may not be entirely separate. The iron pen is introduced in Slumbered as a weapon, cutting like a sword. So are the birds in the St.-John Perse epigraph "armed for action . . . On the white page." The expression about following breadcrumbs comes from the fairy tale of Hansel and Gretel, where the children are unable to follow the breadcrumb trail they lay down because the crumbs are eaten by birds -- leaving, I suppose, an unmarked landscape like a "white page with infinite margins."