1 · Ash and Waking
The first thing was the cold, and the cold had a taste.
It sat on his tongue like the inside of an old bell — iron and dust and something burnt so long ago the burning had forgotten itself. He breathed it in. He breathed it out. For a while that was all there was: the taste of the cold, and the fact of the breath, and a great grey nothing pressing on his eyes.
Then his eyes opened, and the nothing became a sky.
It was not a sky he knew. Some part of him deeper than thought was certain of that — it recoiled from that low, lightless ceiling of cloud before his waking mind had finished calling it a sky at all, from the way it hung motionless and yellow-bruised at its edges, as though even the weather here had died standing up. No sun behind it. No promise of one. Just a smothered greyness that could have been dawn or dusk or the long flat middle of a day that had given up.
He lay in ash.
It drifted over him, fine as flour, banked against his side in soft dunes that had clearly been building for a long while — hours, perhaps. Longer. It filled the creases of his palms when he lifted them, and he stared at his own hands as if they belonged to someone he half-remembered. Broad hands. Scarred across the knuckles. A soldier's hands, or a laborer's. Old white lines and one newer, pinker seam running from wrist to thumb.
He did not know whose they were.
He sat up, and the ash slid off him in sheets, and the world tilted and steadied, and he waited for his name to arrive.
It didn't.
He reached for it the way you reach in the dark for a cup you know is on the table — that easy certainty that it would be there, that of course he had a name, everyone had a name, it would come to him in half a heartbeat. The half-heartbeat passed. The reaching hand closed on nothing. He tried again, slower, feeling along the shelf of himself for anything at all — a face, a voice, a room, a single warm hour of a single remembered day — and found only smooth grey walls where a life should have been. No mother. No home. No enemy. No love. Not even the shape of the wanting of those things. Just breath, and ash, and cold.
Something close to panic uncoiled in his chest, and he was distantly grateful for it, because at least fear was his. He clutched it. He made himself look.
He was kneeling — he'd risen to a knee without noticing — in the bottom of a shallow, dead valley that went on past seeing in every direction. Nothing grew. Nothing moved but the ash. The ground beneath the grey was black and glassy in places, cracked in others, and here and there it heaved up into shapes the eye kept trying to name and flinching from: a fused arch that might once have been a gate; a spar of stone leaning like a broken mast; a low ridge, too even to be natural, that his gut insisted had been a wall. A ruin. He knelt in the corpse of something enormous, and the something had been dead a very long time.
And laid across his knees, where it must have been the whole while, was the sword.
He had not seen it because it had been dark. It was not dark now. As his hand found the grip — leather-wound, worn to the shape of a hand that was, he realized with a lurch, exactly the shape of his hand — a light woke in the steel. Not a flash. A rising, the way warmth rises in a coal you thought was spent, spreading up the fuller of the blade in a thin line of gold that pushed the grey a little further off and made the ash around him glitter like something that had once been snow.
There you are, the sword said.
He did not hear it with his ears. It arrived in the middle of his skull, fully formed, in a voice deep and dry and unbearably gentle — the voice of someone who has been sitting a long vigil at a sickbed and has just seen the sleeper stir. He nearly dropped it. He would have, if his fingers had obeyed him, but they had closed around the grip and would not open, as though some older part of his body had made its choice without asking the rest.
"You," he said. His own voice cracked out of him, unused, a stranger's. "You spoke."
I did. I have been speaking for some time. You were not listening — you were too far down. A pause, and in the pause the gold light pulsed, once, like a slow heart. Welcome back.
"Back from where?"
The light did not answer that. It only warmed, and he felt the warmth run up his arm and into the cold hollow of his chest, and some of the shaking eased.
"What is this place." It came out flat, not a question. He was afraid of the question.
The light on the blade dimmed, and for a moment the sword said nothing at all, and the silence had a weight to it — the weight of a thing choosing how to begin.
A grave, now, it said at last. One of the largest ever dug. But it was not always a grave, and it deserves better than that word from me. The gold warmed, and something moved through the warmth that he could only call grief. This was the Dawn Refuge. The greatest fortress of the dawn that ever stood — and the last. When the roads were dark and the world was cruel, the lost came here, and the frightened, and the hunted, and they were taken in, every one, and they were kept. No one was turned from these gates. It was a home to anyone who had none. That was the whole of what this place was for.
A pause. The gold guttered, steadied.
And when the end came for it, those within did not run. They made a stand here, at a cost I will not lay on you yet, because you are not strong enough to carry it. I remember the dawn light on these walls. I remember when this air was warm. Softer still. Now it is a grave, and a haunted one, and we should not linger. But I wanted you to know it was more than that, before you leave it. It was worth more than that.
He listened, and as the sword spoke of shelter and of a last stand, something turned over in the empty room of him — not a memory, nothing so whole, but an ache, sourceless and exact, the way a scar can pull at a change in the weather years after the wound has closed. He did not know why the words hurt. They hurt.
"Was I—" he started.
Your name is Eldrin, the sword said, gently, and he understood that a door had closed again. That is where we begin.
The word went through him like a swallow of hot water on a cold day — a shock, then a spreading. Eldrin. It fit. It fit the way the grip fit his hand, without his understanding why. It did not bring the rest. There was no flood behind it, no life pouring back through the breach. Just the one word, dropped into the empty room and echoing.
"Eldrin," he repeated, tasting it against the ash. "Eldrin what? Eldrin who?"
Shadowbane, the sword said, and then, when he drew breath to hurl the rest of the questions at it: and that is enough for one waking.
"It is not remotely enough."
No, it agreed, and there was something in the word that was almost sorrow. It is not. But you are a cup with a crack in it, Eldrin Shadowbane, and I will not pour in more than you can hold — not here, not with the cold in you. You would spill. And what would spill is not gentle. The gold dimmed by a shade, as if in apology. Trust me a little while. I have earned it, though you cannot remember how.
He wanted to argue. He found, strangely, that he could not — that the same deep certainty which had recoiled from the sky and welcomed the grip now eased at the words trust me, a quiet going-still somewhere beneath his thoughts, the loosening of a knot he hadn't known was pulled tight. He did trust it. He had no idea why, and the not-knowing frightened him more than the ash and the ruin together, because it meant that whatever he was, whatever had been scraped out of him, this one thread had been left uncut on purpose. He and this sword had a history. It was the only history he had.
"All right," he said quietly. "A little while."
He used the blade to stand — drove the point into the black glass and hauled himself up, and his body came with him in a long unfolding, taller than he'd expected, muscle sliding under a weight of grey rags that had maybe once been fine. Standing, he could see farther. Standing, the valley showed him more of its dead architecture, the drowned bones of the great thing the sword had just named and grieved — and standing, he felt the first thread of the other thing the cold had been hiding.
The land was wrong.
Not merely dead. Dead was clean; dead was a stopped clock. This was a wound that had not been allowed to close. He could feel it now that he was upright and the sword was awake in his hand — a thinness in the air out past the far ridge, a place where the grey seemed to lean, where the world felt worn through like the elbow of an old coat, and behind that worn place something pressed. Something patient and cold and hungry — the cold he'd tasted on waking — and he understood all at once that the cold had not been the absence of warmth. It had been a presence. It had a direction. And it was, very slightly, closer than it had been.
Ah, the sword murmured. You feel it. Good. That is faster than I feared.
"What is it?"
The reason we do not linger. The gold flared, hardened, ran the length of the blade until the whole sword burned like a held torch and threw his shadow long and black across the ash behind him. Something down here has noticed that a light has come on in the grave. Things that live in graves do not care for light. A beat. And you have been asleep a very long time, Eldrin. You are out of the habit of running. Best we reacquaint you before our lives depend on it.
Out past the ridge, in the leaning grey, something moved.
It was far. It was low. It came without sound — no cry, no thunder of feet, just a smear of deeper grey detaching itself from the murk and beginning, unhurried, to flow down the long slope of the dead valley toward the one small gold light burning at the bottom of the world. Behind it, a second smear peeled loose. Then a third.
They were not hurrying. That was the worst of it. They had all the time there had ever been, and he had just woken, and he did not know his own life, and the only friend he had was a sword that would not tell him the truth.
Eldrin Shadowbane wiped the ash from his eyes with the back of one scarred hand, set his feet the way his body already seemed to know how to set them, and lifted the burning blade between himself and the dark.
"Then talk me through it," he said. "While we run."
With pleasure, said the sword, and there was, unmistakably, warmth in it — pride, even, old and sad and glad all at once. Left foot first. And Eldrin — try not to die in the first hour. You have no idea how much work it took to wake you.
He ran.
Behind him, the grey came down the hill.