Older Than the Gods

The Ruby Star

A Star Older Than the Gods

Twenty faces, and not one scholar willing to agree on what it's counting down to.

Item Statistics

As best the Verod Antiquities Registry can measure without getting closer than they'd like.

Form

A perfect ruby icosahedron, roughly the size of a basketball

Composition

Gold, electrum, and platinum, tangled at its heart like a frozen explosion, or a miniature sun caught mid-collapse

Weight

Heavy. Genuinely heavy. Not the charming kind of heavy that makes for a good adventuring story, the kind that makes you reconsider carrying it at all.

Temperature

Faintly warm to the touch, regardless of surrounding conditions

Attunement

Unknown. It has never asked anyone's permission to travel with them, and no one has successfully left it behind.

The Twenty Faces

Each of the icosahedron's twenty faces can hold one inscribed name. Only a hand of the Urilac bloodline can inscribe one, a custodianship the family has held for roughly a thousand years, one keeper at a time.

Origin

The oldest story anyone tells about it, older, some insist, than any god who might otherwise take credit.

Before the gods. Before the first light broke into what would become stars. There were only Two. Not gods, not yet anything with a name, but something closer to a sentient duality: one force and its opposite, wound together in a stillness so complete that neither had ever needed a word for itself.

Then, the story goes, the first force felt something it had no name for, call it love, call it the beginning of wanting, and decided to make a gift for the other. So it reached into the nothing and forged the elements themselves: gold, and fire, and the raw stuff that would one day become every star. That act of making was the first spark. Everything that exists now, every star, every world, every living thing, is said to trace back to that single, deliberate gesture.

The other force was not grateful. It was horrified. Until that moment there had been only the Two, perfect and unbroken. The gift meant that purity was gone, permanently, irreversibly, and that everything from now on would exist only because of that first interference. In revulsion, it took the gift and cast it out into the newly forming universe, unwilling to keep what it saw as the proof of something broken.

That gift still falls. Scholars call it the Ruby Star.

The First Gift

Before the burning of the first far sun,
before the turning of the smallest wheel,
there were but Two, and Two alone were One,
locked in a silence nothing learned to feel.

No name had they, for naming needs a Third
to hear it spoken, hold it, make it true.
They simply were, unmoving, unheard,
a single hush that never asked, nor knew.

Then something stirred in Him that had no word.
Call it a want. Call it the shape of care.
He reached into the dark and, half-absurd,
began to make what never had been there.

He forged the fire before the forge was known.
He bent the light before the light had bent.
He gathered up the void and, all alone,
he built a Star to say what love had meant.

Twenty faces, cut from nothing's hide,
he filled it full of sun and molten gold,
and silver veins ran through it, vein and tide,
a heart still burning though the heart was cold.

He turned to Her, this small and violent sun
cupped careful in his hands like something tame,
and said, though no word yet had he begun:
I made you elements. I made you flame.

She did not weep. She did not turn away.
She looked at what had been, and what would be,
and understood that from this single day
nothing again would ever simply be.

For Two were pure when only Two were known,
and every spark he'd struck to make his gift
had cracked that purity down to the bone
and scattered it, a slow and burning drift.

You have undone us, was the only word
she gave him back, and it was all she gave.
She took the Star, his fire, his first bird,
and cast it out beyond the nearest wave

of forming dark, before the dark had shape,
before the shape had learned to call it far.
It fell through everything without escape
and tumbles still. We call it: the Ruby Star.

No god has claimed it. No hand was meant to hold
what began as sorrow wearing the face of gold.

The Three Brothers

Long before it settled into the safekeeping of a single bard.

Older accounts say the Ruby Star never answered to just one keeper, never fewer than three, never more. The stories name three brothers, raised together under the watch of a dwarf who served the family as much as caretaker as kin, in a village that drew exactly the wrong kind of attention for exactly that reason. A raiding force, goblins, some say, led by an ogre mage by most other accounts, struck the village seeking the boys specifically. Whoever wanted them wanted the Star through them.

The three were suited to it, whether they knew it or not: one touched by Intelligence, one by Dexterity, one by Charisma, a wizard, a rogue, and a bard. When all three lay hands on the Star together, each is said to receive a blessing bound to his gift: a divine sharpening of the mind, the hand, or the tongue, answering to no ordinary limit.

Whether Finton was one of those three brothers, or simply the latest to carry what they once shared between them, is a question even he has stopped trying to answer out loud.

"I asked it what it wanted. It didn't answer. Then again, neither do most of the people I travel with, and I've learned to live with that too." attributed to Finton Urilac

Current Whereabouts

As of the last confirmed sighting.

The Ruby Star currently travels with Finton Urilac, who, by his own account, did not go looking for it so much as it simply stopped being somewhere else. He keeps it close, plays to it occasionally, and reports that it has never once applauded.

Original concept credited to JP. Everything after came later.