Chapter 18 #3
My magic pressed against my ribs, insistent now, the way heat builds in gold just before it becomes workable. Holding it back took effort, disrupted my rhythm. So I stopped fighting it. I chose to become malleable.
Tap, unlock, spin, lock, tap again. Light spilled from my skin. Flow took me—hands and mind moving as one, thought dissolving into instinct, instinct into motion. Limbs sheathed now in shimmering flares, filling the studio's shadows and claiming every darkened corner.
And just before the final strike, the ring—this ring, not the ruby, but this one, the one that felt like part of me—asked for a name.
Important diamonds always carried a name—Koh-i-Noor, Hope, Cullinan.
“Brigid's Sun,” I said to no one. And a thought, fleeting, yet I couldn't force it away, dwelled inside me… something was missing.
Blood.
Instinct took over—calm, certain. I grabbed the box cutter from my bench and willed flame into my palm, passing the blade briefly through the fire to sterilize it.
I waved it once to cool, then pressed the tip into the pad of my finger.
A single drop of blood welled up. I pressed it to the stone.
The diamond answered—igniting into a supernatural supernova.
And in that brilliance, a shape emerged in the middle of the studio.
Human in form, but wrought entirely of light.
And a voice—her voice—echoing in my head.
“You are not merely a smith—you are a poet. Metal and fire your prose and verse. In your hands, a token—an amulet.”
I looked down at the ring clamped in my vise, the yellow diamond fully set, lit from within by an unearthly glow. My pulse thudded in my ears, questions colliding faster than I could catch them. She was talking about this ring.
“My name, my blessings and abundance bestowed upon the one who bears it.”
She meant for me to imbue this ring with magic—somehow—but I couldn't ignore the widening circle of it all. The ruby finding me. The power everyone else seemed to recognize before I did. The Mother's Book appearing when it did. The spellwork that came too easily, too cleanly.
“Why?” I demanded. “Why this magic—the light—the fire?” I flung my hands upward, hammer and bezel pusher still locked in my grip.
The questions tumbled out of me, tangled and raw—every doubt I'd swallowed, every question Sorcha dodged with a shrug and a smile.
“The ruby—the—why me?” It came out in a tumble, the real question.
Maybe the only question I needed an answer to.
I wasn't afraid of the light or the fire—I was astonished by them.
What nagged at me was the reason I'd been singled out.
Why me? The thought had followed me since the first night light spilled from my limbs, Baird's arms still wrapped around me.
The voice that followed was gentle, steadying, soothing the panic that was knotted tight with exhilaration.
“You believe this is happening to you. But it is happening through you, Mira.”
The goddess wasn't going to spill her secrets. She wasn't about to hand me neat, tidy answers and tie them up with a pretty bow.
“You want reasons,” the goddess said gently. “Names. Beginnings. Endings.”
Her presence warmed the air, not with heat, but with certainty. “Power is not a story told in order,” she went on. “It does not arrive with explanations or ask for your comfort before it takes root.”
I huffed out a quiet breath despite myself. Of course she wasn't going to make this easy.
“You ask why you,” she continued, unbothered by my irritation. “You stopped turning from the Sight. A door opened. You began to trust what others saw in you, and then let yourself see. Another door.”
The light around me softened, settling instead of flaring.
“There are bloodlines that remember—” she continued, “—not in names or faces—but in instinct. In the way the hands know what to do before the mind catches up.”
My fingers curled unconsciously around the tools I still held, wood and steel extensions of my own hands, reacting to the words.
“You are a maker. And some of your people before you,” Brigid said. “Shapers. Those who bind what is seen to what is felt. You do not command fire, Mira—you listen to it, more equal partner than master.”
The diamond pulsed once, warm and steady. A silent nod of agreement.
“That is why the ruby answered you,” she said. “Why the book opened to your hands. Why the spells came not as study, but as recall.”
I swallowed. “So I was…born for this?”
A pause, careful and measured. “You were born capable,” Brigid said at last.
Her voice gentled further. “Some legacies do not seek power,” she added. “They seek return.”
I turned that over in my head, knowing the choice of words wasn't an accident, yet still unable to understand her meaning.
She offered no clarification, only a final command that lingered long after her voice faded:
“The blood you gave the yellow gem, you must give to the ruby as well. It requires a piece of you to complete what it was made to do.”
And then the light—and the goddess—were gone.
I pulled the ruby ring from the safe and laid it on the bench.
Then I lifted my finger—the one I'd pierced with the box cutter—and squeezed.
Blood welled at the tip, bright and familiar, and the sight of it pulled me backward in time.
To the class at the Goldsmith's Guild when I'd cut my finger while making the pendant.
The night I'd tested Baird's control by offering him my blood.
The night he'd taken what I gave without knowing the chain of events it would set in motion—the bond forming between us before he, or I, truly understood what it meant.
I wondered if that impulse had been mine at all…or if the goddess had been guiding my hand even then. Like the yellow diamond before it, I pressed the drop of blood into the surface of the ruby.
“May Brigid bless the wearer of this ring,” I whispered, “and guide them back to the one who seeks them.”
The ruby flared to life beneath my touch. Magic stirred within it—deep and quiet, not brilliant like Brigid's Sun, but just as potent. Its purpose settled into the stone, deliberate and sure. And for the first time, I didn't doubt how this chapter of the ruby's story would end.
Tomorrow, I'd put the final polish on the ruby ring, photograph it from a dozen angles, post it to Instagram and my website, and wait for the right buyer to find it.
Then afterward, I'd email Aaron Thorndale to let him know his fiancée's ring was complete, send the invoice for the balance due, and prepare it for shipping.
That part was easy. What wouldn't be easy was boxing up the glittering yellow diamond—the one that had started to feel like a piece of me—and letting it go. That part was going to hurt.