Sunblade

The Sunblade

A weapon that has been passed down through the Sunblade family for generations, this glaive has a distinctive golden hue and is warm to the touch. The etching on its surface are of dragonborn origin and date back to the first age of smithing.

The glaive is, in actuality, a fragment of an ancient, primordial dragon's soul, salvaged and forged into a glaive by a master craftsman long past. The only remnants of the demigod's once great form, it seeks to eradicate malevolent darkness from the world through its wielder. It seeks its brethren. Age and its irrevocably broken form has rendered it incapable of true sentience, but its benevolent demeanor lives on. Both in protecting and caring for that who it attunes to, and its stubborn-minded hatred of undead.

Deeper power radiates within it's living metal, but it cannot be accessed - at least not without help. It requires a communion with a place of draconic power to continue. Flashes of a pool of water in a tall, stone room; a place lost to time and rarely disturbed except to those who wield similar.

Despite its age, it radiates a protective atmosphere - though it cannot speak you are able to discern the following:

You are my wielder. As I protected your sire I now protect you, and shield the radiance you use to direct my own. I have waited a long time to serve you, Roque.

The Radiant Dragon

Part of a set of eight ancient draconic weapons known as the Enaid, the Sunblade is said to be made of a shard of the primordial dragon of radiance's soul. While the telling varies slightly between different Dragonborn communities, the legends surrounding it has the same rough beats amongst all.

The radiant dragon was bitter rivals with his brother, the dragon of necrotic energy. While only the Mother Dragon, Ith, was able to create true life, both dragons claimed the sole ability to foster the growth and persistence of life on their own. A joint leadership on this matter was unimaginable, and soon petty fights turned into an endless war. Necrotic energy would wither the plants and dragonborn that attempted to seek the life-giving sun, and radiance would smite any mushrooms on the corpses, or the corpses themselves if given an arcane unlife - for a life that fed on other life to survive was not a life at all, in their eyes.

Their endless rivalry eventually marred the landscape into a featureless wasteland as mountains were knocked down and ravines clawed apart to find any pockets of life one attempted to hide from the other. Arid cracks and charred bodies unable to decompose were the only features of the desolate territory the two created.
The inability of both dragons to cease their fighting to allow life to flourish was one of the reasons that Ith finally rose up; by killing the necrotic and radiant primordial dragons, plants and dragonborn kind could finally grow and enjoy the world the Mother Dragon had created for them.

The famed hero Thraxius created each of the eight legendary weapons on his pilgrimage for Ith. When the dragonborn turned their back on Ith and called her a devil, it was Thraxius that bargained for their continued existence and believed in her might when none else did. In exchange for retrieving each of the eight shards and crafting them into weapons, she would spare the dragonborn - and in doing so, create avatars of draconic might that the race could use to protect themselves. In these trials Thraxius proved himself worthy of the Mother Dragon herself, being credited even today as the first blacksmith and a guide/saint for the hammers for those that practice his craft.

The Sunblade was the fifth weapon forged, the shard having come to rest on an arid desert landscape high up in the mountains, mirroring the shard of its necrotic brother which had come to rest in a deep ravine. When Thraxius first tried to retrieve the shard, it burned so bright it blinded him for seven days and seven nights, and when he finally pulled the shard from its resting place the clearing collapsed and he barely escaped with his life. It is said that the radiance is the reason that the blade takes on such a slender form - not only so that it looked like a beam of sunlight taken form, but also because Thraxius could only look at it for so long while forging it into shape and a slim profile was easier on the eyes.

Once his pilgrimage was done, Thraxius bestowed the each of the Enaid upon a different dragonborn to carry on the primordial dragon's legacy. For the Sunblade, Thraxius chose Orielle Sunblade to wield the glaive - the dragonborn was said to have been his "light" during his journey, and he loved them dearly.

Each of the ancient weapons were handed along their respective family lines, and those that wielded them came to be known as the Knights of the Enaid. They were known for being protectors, regarding the entire dragonborn race as their charge and hoard and fighting for them with the same fierce loyalty Thraxius once fought for them.

Dragonborn that wielded the Sunblade were known to be brilliant in battle, with a dance-like fight style that refused to distinguish the air from the ground, and a radiant breath attack that could bring the fury of sunlight to even the darkest of places. However, they were also one of the kindest of the group - stories and murals of the Sunblade line frequently depict them with animals. Known as the champion of the weak and those who could not speak, their presence was said to illuminate the way forward, both for the Enaid and the dragonborn people at large.

It is said the disappearance of the Sunblade weapon and family line/heir was the final straw as to why the Knights of the Enaid have not been seen as a collective since the Orcan-Elven War. Some say the swansong of the Knights of Enaid has already been sung, and in an age of new gods where dragonborn are a minority in the world there is no place for the group. Others say the group will take on a new form and purpose to survive and resurface in a world surely hurling towards an Ith born Armageddon. And others more say that the group simply lies dormant, not lost but waiting for a time where dragonborn kind can seize back the lands of their ancestors under the banner of the Knights of the Enaid, and usher in a new golden age for their kind.