f.1 || Darkness and the Ruby

The Ruby of Old

As the limp body of the priestess falls to the floor, the room is still for a moment, the scent of freshly spilled blood fills the air as the tension in the room releases. The glowing aura around Braden fades as the group converges around the limp, bloody figure before them. Scratches across the pale skin of her face, blood soaked in her hair and the fabric of her robes. Rowan kneels down, takes his arms behind her neck, and unclasps the necklace holding the glowing ruby that seems to be pulsing at the moment, like a steady heartbeat. Each beat of the ruby makes the priestess look even more dead, from the skin going extremely pale and cold to the touch, to the hair falling out of the skull in clumps.

As the pendant is removed from the priestess, the pulsating convulsions of the ruby cease, and the ruby sits still in the pendant in Rowans hand.

The light emitted from the ruby is still as bright as it was to begin with, but now that the group are closer, the light seems all the more bright, as it encompasses the entire room, basking it in bright light. The outside is still pitch dark, and the hustle and bustle of the town seems to have died down completely. The sounds of battle still ring and linger in the ears of the group, the sounds of arrows being fired and impacting on flesh or hard floor, spells being flung across the room, axes being swung, and the resounding bang when it impacts anything, and the silencing crack of bone that ended the fight. The group stood in a semicircle around the priestess look at each other, each with looks of content, but some have unasked questions beneath the surface.

"Edith, could you identify what this is please?" Rowan looks over at Edith, who is already pulling a small pearl out of her component pouch in order to cast the spell. Edith raises her hand, palm facing upwards towards Rowan for him to place the pendant down in her hand. She lowers her hand towards her, before placing the ruby on her forehead and beginning the drawing of the identification rune which sprawls across the ground around her in curved and spiraled designs that flow in a natural yet arcane pattern. The pendant is then placed in the centre of the rune and Edith, who is sitting behind the pendant, closes her eyes and focuses her breathing and concentration. The ruby starts to glow brighter, as it floats a couple inches off the floor, and Edith opens her eyes too. Edith's eyes are not the white sclera with the blue iris as usual, but a block of glowing white energy that matches a similar colour of the glow coming from the ruby. She too begins to float a couple inches off the floor, the sprawling rune beneath her beginning to slightly glow as well. Rowan is sitting down against the wall, waiting patiently for the spell to be cast, as Braden is sitting in one of the front pews closest to the spell, and Barney is walking lengths of the church impatiently. The spell begins to fade as Edith slowly floats back to the ground, her eyes no longer glazed over and glowing. The pendant falls slowly after and Edith reaches her hand out to catch it. The sprawling runes that were once glowing have stopped glowing, and begun to fade away, starting with the outer parts of the intricate network of spiraling lines and dots that curve around the circle to make the series of arcane runes that are required for the spell. The runes entirely fade over the course of roughly six seconds.

Edith widens her eyes, and her breathing quickens slightly as she hastily and haphazardly pops the ruby out of the pendant, leaving the symbol of Pelor hanging on the chain thrown off to the side on the floor. She swallows before hurrying over to Rowan and passing him the Ruby and pulling out a notebook, jotting down things rapidly and scanning her eyes across the pages and reading her notes.

"This is an incredibly old and powerful gem that must be destroyed to fix this. I do not exactly know how to destroy at this moment in time but I feel it will have to be magic of some description. I'm not sure if this is magic I will be capable of for a long time. I fear this is out of our reaches at the moment," She says, looking from her notebook, to Rowan, and back multiple times. Notes and diagrams of the Ruby are scattered across the two page spread in her notebook, with haphazardly drawn annotations and quickly jotted down observations. She shows Rowan the notebook, and he scans it, raising his eyebrow as he looks at the diagrams and messily wrote annotations about them.

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A/N 

Hey I'm back.

Sorry for the lack of updates in the past couple days, I have just been having a bit of writers block and lack of inspiration or direction for the rest of the story, but I have the rest of it planned out. Updates will be on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays here in NZ starting next week, for a couple weeks as there is only five or six chapters left of the story and then I will begin planning my next project. If you have enjoyed the chapter, please vote and share, and if you wish to read more of my stories in the future consider dropping a follow on my account, it helps me so much.

Avid-Writer