The storm drove Corwin off the ridge and into the mountain before he’d meant to stop. He ducked beneath a low arch of wet stone, boots skidding on moss, and only when the thunder dulled to a murmur behind him did he realize the cave wasn’t dark at all.
Light pooled ahead of him, low and gold, breathing like something alive. He followed it down a throat of rock worn smooth by centuries of water, and the passage opened into a hollow vast enough to swallow a cathedral — and there, driven to the hilt in a slab of pale crystal, stood the sword.
It was not resting. It was waiting. He felt that the instant he saw it, the way you feel a held breath in a room before anyone speaks. Motes of light circled the blade in slow, deliberate orbits — not fireflies, he understood after a moment, but small quick shapes with wings like cut glass, murmuring to one another in a language made of chimes.
Before the crystal knelt a warrior of stone, head bowed, hand still curled around a hilt that was no longer there. Centuries of dust had softened his shoulders, but his posture held no surrender in it. Only patience.
Corwin should have turned back. Instead he crossed the hollow, and the fae-lights scattered upward like startled sparks, watching from the dark instead of fleeing it.
He did not reach for the sword. He didn’t need to. Three feet away, the light along its edge shivered and bent toward him, unmistakably, like a flame leaning into a draft.
The kneeling knight’s stone eyes were closed. Corwin was almost certain, though he could never afterward prove it to himself, that they were not closed a moment before.
He left before dawn without the blade. But walking the ridge again, he could still feel it — a warmth at his back, unclaimed, unhurried, and entirely unwilling to be forgotten.