As the Black Knight defends the Marvel Universe from an Arthurian threat, he forges his own magical throne to protect its future.
WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Black Knight: Curse of the Ebony Blade #5, on sale now from Marvel.
Dane Whitman has always had a combative dynamic with his own superpowers, with the mythical Ebony Blade he wielded as part of his Arthurian lineage coming with its own corrosive curse that has affected him for years. And as the Black Knight battles against the magical supervillain Mordred, he finds a new use for the cursed material that he has been linked with all his life.
Now, he’s effectively embracing the possibilities of the material’s curse as he constructs his own Iron Throne with the mystical metal, effectively giving the Marvel Universe an Arthurian window into its possible future.
Over the course of Black Knight: Curse of the Ebony Blade — by Si Spurrier, Sergio Davila, Sean Parsons, Arif Prianto and VC’s Cory Petit — Dane has contended with both his outsider status in the Marvel Universe’s superhero community and the constant knowledge that the source of his powers, the Ebony Blade, was steadily corrupting him. A strange metal that crashed on Earth as a meteor ages ago before being further enchanted by Merlin, the Ebony Blade was cursed by all the blood it had spilled over the subsequent millennia amplifying the negative traits of those that wield it, often to destructive effect as Dane has lost control of himself before due to his weapon’s dark influence.
As Mordred resurfaced, plotting to seize the Ebony Crown and use it to transform the world into a new Camelot in his twisted image, Dane learned that the Ebony Blade had the surprise new power to resurrect Black Knights, healing their mortal wounds as they rose back in stronger than before. As Dane and his newfound daughter Jacks defeated Mordred and reclaimed the ebony material for themselves, Dane decided to put the mystical metal to good use and constructed a throne in the center of his family’s ancestral home of Garrett Castle, built out of the remains of the Ebony Crown to become what Dane refers to as the Ebon Siege.
Having received visions after drinking from the lethal Ebony Chalice, the Ebon Siege offers those that sit upon it to look through time and space, with suggesting the chair can take one anywhere in the past, present and future. This makes it similar to Metron’s Mobius Chair in the DC Universe though, upon sitting on it, Dane isn’t physically transported anywhere but instead receives dark visions of the near future. These visions include the X-Men clad in ghostly armor, trouble in the skies of London and something Dane ominously refers to the Hungry Place before he decides to break from sitting on the Ebon Siege to reconnect with his daughter and new Black Knight Jacks.
While the Black Knights still have a contentious relationship with their familial curse through the Ebony Blade, Dane has been able to channel it into a magical throne that allows him to witness any point in history and join the small number of Marvel superheroes that can peer into the future. Dane was never going to break the curse of the Ebony Blade and suddenly become the most admired superhero in the Marvel Universe. But through his battle against Mordred and reunion with his long-lost daughter, Dane has instead learned to lean into the curse and continue to redirect it towards good.
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