The sun returned on the seventh day.
Seven days of night had draped the Radiant Empire like a funeral shroud. Torches guttered and died. Crops withered in the fields. Old men wept, having never known true darkness, while children were born who would never know the color gold.
On the morning of the eighth day, a thin red line bled across the horizon.
The empire rejoiced. Bells rang from every tower. The Emperor himself stepped onto the balcony of the Solar Palace, arms raised, letting the newborn light bathe his immortal face. Priests of the Eternal Dawn sang until their throats bled. In every village square, white oxen were slaughtered and suns painted on doors with the warm blood.
They celebrated for seven full days.
On the eighth, the midwife who had delivered him was hanged. She still clutched the afterbirth when the Inquisitors dragged her to the gallows. Her crime was inscribed on a board around her neck in golden ink:
"Gave birth to the Sunless."
He was too young to remember any of it, of course. But memory is unnecessary for pain. Some wounds carve so deep they become bone. He learned to read the world with his skin.
The Abyssal Rift knew no sunlight—only the glow of dying Sun Shards clinging to corpses. Thousands of infants had been thrown there before him; tiny skeletons draped in ceremonial white. Their shards flickered like candle stubs. He crawled among them, drinking what little warmth remained.
Shadows had taste.
The shadow of a duke tasted like burning honey and broken promises.
The shadow of a saint tasted like incense and lies.
The shadow of a mother who jumped after her child tasted like salt and goodbye.
He ate until he stopped shivering.
Eighteen years passed beneath the world.
Then, one day, the chains around his wrists—the same iron chains used on every Sunless infant for seven centuries—screamed. They screamed because they remembered sunlight, and sunlight was coming back.
He stood.
The black sword he had forged from those chains rested across his shoulders. Longer than he was tall. Heavier than sin. It had never reflected light, nor did it need to. Every ray that had ever touched it had already died inside.
He began climbing.
Stone crumbled beneath his fingers. Corpses he had once curled against for warmth turned to dust as he passed. The higher he climbed, the brighter it became, until the light itself hurt in a way he had no name for.
At dawn, he reached the lip of the Rift.
A village spread beneath him, painted gold by the rising sun. Faded paper lanterns from last week's celebration still hung between the houses. Children ran in circles, laughing because the darkness had finally ended. Old women burned incense to thank the Crimson Father for his mercy.
His feet touched solid ground for the first time.
They left no prints.
Every person in the village cast a perfect shadow on the dirt road—sharp, black, obedient. Every shadow except his.
A little girl noticed first. She pointed with a sticky hand.
"Mama, that big brother has no shadow."
Laughter stopped.
He walked forward. People recoiled, as if he carried plague. Their shadows stretched, tore, and snapped back like frightened dogs on leashes.
He stopped before the village shrine.
A bronze disk, the size of a wagon wheel, gleamed as if polished with fire. Every morning, the village head struck it to "wake the sun." Today it shone brighter than ever, as if trying to atone for the seven days it had slept.
He raised a pale hand and touched the metal.
Warmth crawled up his arm like insects, seeking a place a Sun Shard should be. It found only absence.
The disk screamed. A high, thin sound, like a thousand mirrors shattering at once.
He withdrew his hand.
At the center of the bronze disk, where his palm had rested, the sun's reflection was gone.
Just black.
He drew Eclipse from his back. The blade made no sound. Sound is a kind of light, and light died inside it.
With his left hand, he dipped two fingers into the puddle of shadow at his feet—thick, oily, alive. He wrote a single character on the bronze disk, slow and precise: 還 (Return).
Then he turned and walked away.
Behind him, the shrine disk split down the middle with a crack that rolled across the sky like thunder. High above, impossibly far, the newborn sun flickered once—as if something had blown dust across its face.
He kept walking north, toward the heart of the empire that had murdered him before he drew breath.
The sun bled gold over a world that had forgotten true darkness. It would remember soon.
His name was Sunniless. And he had come back for what was taken.