Closed to my good friend Storm Veritas, and part of a huge gdoc project we have been writing now for well over a year. It might take a bit of time to get all the posts up, but this placeholder will suffice for now. Follows on from Unleashed
Storm,

Please find enclosed a ring you’ll recognise almost instantly. This is going to be one hell of a ramble, so grab a whisky. There’s a lot to tell, but I'll try to get to the point.
It’s been twelve months since January. By the gods, that’s passed quickly, hasn’t it? Feels like yesterday that Arius had us tied up in seething knots, clawing at anything and everything we could to try and kill the bastard. We got him, though.

Once we did, I realized the sobering reality of what had been left behind. Everything we built had been reduced to rubble, and Whitevale left decimated. I don’t think either of us knew what to do next. The apparent choice was to rebuild and regroup, or to disband and crack on with what life we had left.

The thing is, we never really made any sort of choice. Time passed us by. Whitevale’s reconstruction began without us two months later, in March, by the few survivors who were out of town on the night Arius came calling. No-one asked us, because they didn’t need to. They just chose to keep living. If nothing else, for me it offered a brief glimpse of optimism that perhaps we did something right, if the people there had that will to carry on.

Our paths somewhat diverged after Arius, and mine took me “home”.

The Council of Five (i.e my superiors in Telgradia) summoned me back home to Telgradia. Well, what was left of it. It turns out that while we were busy playing cat and mouse with the bald one, a meteor struck Mythandria (a prefecture to the west of Telgradia’s heartland). The losses were catastrophic. Those that did survive only did so by sheer luck, and only in Garah (capital city, I can’t expect you to know the geography) where a good proportion of the suburbs reside underground. Everything east is under a foot of glass, in a sheet that stretches for thousands of miles. All that’s left now on the surface to the west are the broken shells of settlements, and all around us a dust cloud that the best mages amongst us say will dissipate “in the next year”. That’s if their magic works. (It seldom does).

My father, King of Telgradia Telos Soltair, perished with the rest of Garah’s surface in the initial impact. I’ll not bore you, and will keep my feelings about him to myself. With me being the only surviving member of that family, I would have been king now. But, as it turns out, even a pardoned exile relinquishes the right to ascend the throne. So, the role to rule and govern falls to the Council of Five. Remy Krystanthia, leader of the Five (and my mentor, once. Long story.), barely survived the impact. I was asked by the Council to bury my father, and then take Remy offworld, back to Althanas, so that she could heal.

It’s been six months since that time. She’s recovered, somewhat, but she doesn’t want to go back. Understandable. For now, she’s living with me and wants to stick around a bit. I think that’s somewhat less understandable.

So, you’re probably wondering at this point what the fuck any of this has to do with anything. Here’s the thing.
Since being a child, Remy has experienced a strange phenomenon she lovingly calls her “gut instinct”. It allows her to read people’s intentions and feelings, without invading their mind, to an absurd degree. When you deprived Arius of his signet ring in Tylmarande, I kept hold of it. I don’t really know why – maybe I just wanted to keep an eye on it, just in case. But to me, it always stayed cold and lifeless to the touch. Exactly the way it should have been. Sometimes, I even wondered if the strength that flowed from it and sustained Arius was a figment of our imagination.

Worryingly, when she came here, Remy was able to feel something from it straight away. With any other object, even enchanted ones (at least the ones in the museums in Radasanth), she’s never been able to sense anything. But she kept telling me that this ring had the most fractional sparks of energy that come close to “thoughts and feelings”. Enough to pick up on, but not enough to translate to anything useful. “Thoughts and feelings” is pretty fucking vague, but anything living (even fractionally) in that ring was a threat as far as I’m concerned.

Naturally, I threw everything I had at it. We both did. There’s not so much as a scratch on the damned thing.
So, figuring the bald bastard had put a protective enchantment on it or something, I took it to a few different people considered masters in their particular fields of magic. No dice. No-one could break the protection, or even tell if it WAS protected in the first place.

I did some research on the ring’s origins. Or tried. Spent hours pouring through books, identifying various jewelry over the ages and their cultural significance. Turns out that there are fucking millions of pages of information on all sorts of things, and I didn’t have the time to sit there reading everything. But I noticed a familiar style of rune etched on the inside that reminded me of a piece of pottery I had seen in Irrakam once. Eventually, I found half a page (half!) nestled away in a book detailing Fallien’s tribes, and no shit, the signet was there in color. The same ring, same emblem, same design.

The text mostly spoke in riddles and with no regard whatsoever of whether I understood the intent behind it. But, from the bit of information I did glean, the ring was worn by selected members of the Valtal tribe who live beyond the glass sands.

This is a guess (born out of utter paranoia), but I think Arius stole this ring from them (or someone related to them) and cursed it, or worse. I wouldn’t put anything past him, and I’m not going to. Remy is concerned that the ring may be a precursor to something much worse. So, if what I ask fails, I will go to Fallien to meet with the Valtal. We may get answers, we may not. I’ll take the risk.

But, before we go anywhere, and potentially waste weeks of our time, I wondered if you might try some of your magnetism on the ring? It is the only avenue I have not explored, and you’re the only one with capabilities in this field.

You’ve done your time on this, and I am not so selfish that I would ask more of you when you have already given everything. But, if your power doesn’t work, well… I’ll have to take that trip. If you want to do a bit of traveling with a trusted friend, to one of the most inhospitable places on the planet (on nothing but an absolute whim), write me back. If not, I completely understand.

As they say - no rest for the fucking wicked.

S-v-O