"He had a magic gun.

But he could never figure out how to use magic, so he primarily just went around shooting things.”

Ahab’s Crosshairs is described as a “god weapon” by Karkat and as a “legendary weapon” by Eridan.  Eridan is also curiously convinced that there can only be one.

Eridan only passes on the code for it when he doesn’t want it anymore.  He also seems dimly aware that he should be giving it to an “inheritor of his old calling.”  He settles on Jade.

But he soon recognizes that the gun’s inheritor is more likely to be her grandson.

(Incidentally, it’s now clear that Eridan was hatched to finish the work not of the Alternian Orphaner Dualscar but of Cronus Ampora, the Beforan Bard of Hope.  Somehow, Eridan inherited his calling, and with it his weapon, from the other side of the Scratch.  “Origins that are impossible to understand or trace”; “some say they emerge spontaneously from the Void”…)

Eridan also persists until Jade accepts the code and makes the weapon, even though he doesn’t exactly get the gratitude he might have expected, and even though “selfless” is among the last words I’d use to describe an Ampora.

It’s rather as if, in order to fully forsake his old destiny (which he says he’s doing “now” because he “just” found a better one), he has to give away Ahab’s Crosshairs.

Almost as if there are unwritten rules tying the gun’s owner to the destiny of opposing the Lord of Angels…

It was bad enough that Eridan believed the power was in his wand when the wand was useless and the power was in his little black heart all along.  As it turns out, the single character most insistent that “magic isn’t real” was the owner of an apparent juju.