The Dawnbringer Stone stands on the cold far-northern coast of Shyona, a weathered pedestal of grey rock at the edge of the Norswell Sea where the golden plains give out into shingle and salt wind. It holds a sword. Dawnbringer was forged a continent away to the south, at the Temple of Bryn beneath the Sandreach, where the fire and light leylines crossed and the temple's smiths drew the two together into a single blade. The temple is a glass ruin now, scoured when the volcano Belu Jenari pushed up burning out of the desert. The sword was carried north after that ending, set on this stone, and left.
Who brought it here, and why, no one can say. The temple kept no record of itself that came through the burning, and whoever made the journey left no name on the stone or in any account of the coast. The blade simply arrived, in a season no one wrote down, and has stood on its pedestal long enough that the rock beneath the grip has worn smooth.
A forged thing carries only what was worked into it. Dawnbringer holds the fire and light beaten into its steel at the convergence, and it draws nothing fresh from this cold shore, far from any seam. So it does not flare or surge the way the live crossing at the temple still does. It gives off a steady warmth and a low even light it has no business holding, here at the edge of a sea that freezes its own spray.
The effect is plain to anyone who comes near. Frost will not hold on the stone or the ground a few paces around it. The shingle there stays bare and faintly warm through the worst of the Norswell winter, when everything past that ring is locked white, and fishermen working the southern shallows steer by the glow on dark nights. A traveler who walks up to the pedestal feels the cold drop away by degrees, and the light in the steel catches the salt haze like a coal that will not go out. The coast folk leave it where it stands. They do not climb the pedestal or close a hand on the grip, and the older among them will only say that a thing this warm on a shore this cold is owed a wide berth.