The entrance hall was a skeleton.

The tapestries were gone. Burned or stolen or rotted to nothing. He couldn’t even guess. The chandeliers that had hung from the ceiling were twisted metal on the floor. The marble floor was cracked and stained, great chunks missing where something—someone—had torn it up for reasons Idris couldn't guess.

But the bones were still there. The columns that lined the walls, blackstone from the Mourning Mountains, still standing despite everything. The grand staircase, curving up toward the upper floors, its steps worn by centuries of use but still intact. 

Ramzah had stopped just inside the doors. His head was tilted back, his eyes traveling up the columns to the vaulted ceiling far above. 

"This place," Ramzah breathed. "It must have been…"

"Magnificent," Idris finished for him. "It was."

They stood for a moment in the ruined hall, two figures dwarfed by what remained. Then Idris moved toward the staircase.

"The throne room," he said. "Upstairs. At the end of the main hall."

He climbed.

The upper floors were worse than the entrance. Walls had collapsed, spilling stone across corridors. Ceilings had fallen in, exposing rooms to the sky. Furniture that had once been elegant was now just splinters, rotted and broken beyond recognition. 

Idris walked through it all with a kind of numb detachment. This room had been his mother's sitting room. This corridor had led to his father's study. This door had opened onto the library, with its thousands of volumes, its rolling ladders, its deep chairs where he'd spent countless hours reading by firelight.

The library was gone. The walls remained, but the books were ash on the floor, their pages crumbling to nothing at the slightest touch. Idris looked for a long moment, then turned away.

The main hall stretched before him.

It was long and high, its ceiling supported by the same blackstone columns as the entrance. Windows lined one wall, most of them broken, their stained glass shattered into fragments that still glittered among the rubble on the floor. At the far end, raised on a dais of blackstone, stood the throne.

It was still there.

Idris's breath caught.

The throne of Darkthorn was not a comfortable thing. It was carved from a single block of blackstone, its back rising into two twisted spires that framed whoever sat in it like the wings of some great bat. It was stark and severe and ancient, and it had held the rulers of Darkthorn for thousands of years.

It still stood. Cracked, yes—a great fissure ran from one arm down to the base—but standing. There. As if waiting for someone to return.

And in front of it, driven into the stone of the dais like a spike through a heart, was a sword.

Idris stopped walking.

Ramzah stopped too, sensing the shift in him.

"That's it," Idris said. His voice was barely a whisper. "That's my grandfather's sword."

He approached slowly, as if in a dream. The sword was sunk deep into the blackstone, its blade buried almost to the hilt. The crossguard and the pommel were visible. The crossguard shaped sharp, spread like wings, the pommel with a dark magenta gem that seemed to absorb light rather than reflect it.

Even after three centuries, it looked new. No rust. No tarnish. No sign of the damage that had destroyed everything around it.

His grandfather's sword. The blade that had been forged in the fires of the Mourning Mountains, made to be quenched in the blood of the dragon Bahamut, passed down through generations of his family. 

He reached out and touched the hilt.

Power.

It roared through him like nothing he'd felt since waking, not the dull hunger that had plagued him, not the weakness that had dogged his every step, but power. Clean and cold, flowing from the sword into his hand, into his arm, into his chest, filling the empty spaces that sleep had carved in him.

His vision cleared. His muscles tightened. The hunger, still present, retreated to a manageable ache.

For a moment, he was whole again.

Then the flow stopped, and he was just Idris. Still weak, still hungry, still three centuries out of his time, but with his hand on his grandfather's sword and the weight of his legacy pressing down on his shoulders.

Idris stood frozen for a long moment, his hand still wrapped around the hilt, the echo of that power still tingling in his veins. 

"Well?" Ramzah's voice came from somewhere behind him. "Can you pull it out?"

Idris didn't answer. He was staring at the sword, at the dark magenta gem in its pommel, at the way the light seemed to bend around it. 

Idris turned and sat on the throne.

The blackstone was cold beneath him. It seeped through his clothes, into his bones, and for a moment he was a child again, sitting on his grandfather's knee in this very seat, listening to stories of dragons and wars and the founding of their line.

Then his hand, still wrapped around the sword's hilt, moved.

He didn't guide it. The sword guided him, pulling, directing, positioning his grip. His other hand rose of its own accord, joining the first on the hilt, and he felt it, the rightness of it, the way the blade seemed to fit his palms as if it had been made for him alone.

The throne room faded.

There was only the sword. Only the connection. Only the blood deep recognition of something that had been waiting three hundred years for his return.

And then the blade moved.

The metal itself shifted, rippled, and from just above the crossguard, four thin spikes erupted. Straight into Idris's hands.

He screamed.

It wasn't pain, not exactly. It was more than pain. It was an invasion. The spikes driving through flesh and muscle and bone, not cutting but merging, becoming part of him even as he became part of them. He could feel the sword's essence flooding into his body, could feel his own essence flowing back along the blade, could feel the boundaries between himself and the weapon blurring, dissolving, fusing.

Ramzah was shouting something. Idris couldn't hear him. Couldn't hear anything except the roar of blood in his ears and the song of the sword in his soul.

Three centuries of separation. Three centuries of waiting. Three centuries of the blade buried in stone, alone, abandoned, dreaming of the hand that would finally return to claim it.

I'm here, Idris thought. I'm here. I came back.

The spikes dug deeper.

And then, as suddenly as they'd appeared, they retracted.

They slid out of his hands as smoothly as they'd entered, leaving behind not wounds but marks—four small scars on each palm, arranged in a pattern that matched the crossguard's design. They glowed faintly for a moment, magenta like the pommel stone, then faded to silver against his pale skin before healing completely.

Idris sat in the throne, breathing hard, staring at his hands.

The sword was quiet now. Waiting.

He made a motion with his hands and the sword shattered into iridescent glitter. He brought his hand back and it appeared in his grip. He repeated the process twice, summoning and dispelling the sword with ease.

He smiled.

It was a small thing at first, just a twitch at the corner of his mouth. But it grew, spread, became something wider and wilder than anything Ramzah had seen from him since they'd met.

"Idris?" Ramzah's voice was cautious. Wary. "What just happened?”

"It remembers me," he said. "The sword remembers me. It accepts me."

He stood.

The throne released him reluctantly. He could feel it, the way the blackstone seemed to pull at him, trying to keep him seated. But he was done sitting. He was done waiting. He was done playing the passive victim of a world that had moved on without him.

He was Count Idris of Darkthorn, last son of the Al-Bey, and his sword was again claimed.

Idris summoned the blade once more, and lifted it high.

The blade was massive. Nearly as tall as he was, its length towering above everything around it. The dark metal seemed to glow with its own inner light, and the pommel gem was now glowing, pulsing like a heartbeat, like a second heart beating in time with his own. He held it aloft with both hands, feeling its weight. It was not heavy, not light, but perfect.

The sword was his.

His grandfather's sword. His family's sword. His sword.

He laughed.

It started as a chuckle, then grew into something bigger, something that echoed off the ruined walls and filled the empty throne room with sound. He laughed and laughed and laughed, and the sword sang with him, and for one perfect moment, the weight of three centuries lifted from his shoulders.

"It's good to be back," he said.

He lowered the blade, resting its point on the cracked stone of the dais. Its hilt at chest height, its blade a mirror of darkness stretching down to the floor. It looked right there. It looked home.

Ramzah stared at him from the entrance to the throne room. His expression was complicated, awe and wariness and something that might have been the beginning of respect.

"That's..." He trailed off, searching for words. "The Dawnbringer… you really are a son of the Al-Bey clan"

Idris grinned at him. Baring his fangs and the joy of reclaiming something long lost.

Ramzah took a step closer, his eyes fixed on the blade. "What can it do? I’ve always heard of it, but what is so special about it?"

Idris considered the question. His grandfather had told him stories—of battles won, of enemies felled, of feats that seemed impossible until you saw them with your own eyes. But stories were just stories until you tested them yourself.

"I don't know yet," he admitted. "By the time I had gotten it I was at war with the mages so I didn’t have much time to figure it out. Now however, I shall."

He looked around at the cracked walls, the shattered windows, the rubble that had once been the heart of his kingdom. Three centuries of loss, spread out before him like a wound that would never fully heal.

But he had the sword. He had his name. He had a princess who had sworn to help him rebuild.

And he had three days to get back to the convoy before they left without him.

"We need to move," he said, echoing his own words from earlier. But this time, they felt different. This time, he had something worth moving for.

He turned toward the door, Dawnbringer in his hand, its point trailing behind him like a banner. Ramzah fell into step beside him, and together they walked out of the throne room, out of the palace, out of the ruins of Darkthorn.

Behind them, the throne sat empty, waiting for a return that Idris was going to wager his life to make.