The immortal wizards were the most powerful humans ever to walk the planet Tharia, but the wars between them devastated the planet and the whole world breathed a sigh of relief when the last of them was killed. In an attempt to cheat death, though...
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Saturn waited until Thomas had disappeared back into the ship, then lifted his eyepatch up onto his forehead to reveal the ruby that lay hidden there. He wanted to have another look at the ring. A real look.
Even without the ruby, his magic sense was a good deal more sensitive than Thomas's, and amongst all the radiant magics of the ring he thought he could detect something else. Something that didn't really belong there. The faintest trace of a magic of a slightly different flavour than the rest, as if it had been cast by a different wizard. And recently too. If it was what he thought it was, then it would normally decay in just a few short decades, leaving nothing but a faint patch of randomised magic. This was fresh and new, though. No more than a few years old. What was it? Could it be...?
He looked at it through the ruby that sat in his vacant eye socket. Seen like this, the ring appeared altogether different. A non-wizard looking at it would have seen only a ring of polished metal or stone. Elaborately decorated but inert, just sitting there, but to Saturn's enhanced vision the ring was the focus of powerful forces. A brilliant golden trumpet of force like the funnel of a raging tornado, reaching out towards him as if to suck him in, to draw him in to some terrible fate on the other side where its unknown twin would spit him out in disgust.
The beauty of the display amazed him even as its power awed him. He'd had no idea the structure of the magical fields would be so complex, so intricate! Clearly this was the work of an immortal wizard. A wielder of powers now thankfully unknown in the world. And yet, hadn't similar rings been created by lesser wizards, back at the dawn of the art? Perhaps, but they could have been nothing like this! This, this awesome artifact resembled those earlier rings the same way the Sword of Retribution resembled a kitchen knife. It seemed almost a sacrilege to use the same word to describe it.
It took a real effort of will to drag his attention away from the totality and concentrate on the anomaly he'd sensed. Yes, there it was. A tiny patch of dull red buried amidst the shifting golden rays like a stain or a bruise. He could see it clearly now. It was a Mage Mark. An identifying symbol visible only to its maker or to a highly accomplished wizard like Saturn whose magic sense had grown unusually acute. Saturn had no doubt that Salammis could have left a mark of such subtlety that not even he could have sensed it, though. The crudity of this mark was telling. It had been made by someone else.
But how? The ring had been encased in a protective shell until a few minutes ago, and his divination spell had revealed that it had travelled 'far and fast', far beyond the reach of any Tharian wizard. Unless... Yes, of course! He should have realised at once. This ring and its twin were, in effect, one ring that was in two places at the same time. The unknown wizard had marked not this ring but its twin, and the mark now showed up on both of them. Obvious!
That still left unanswered questions, though. The twin of this ring must obviously also be in vacuum, or else all the air around it would be sucked through and spat out into space. If it was down on the surface of Tharia, for instance, it would be surrounded by a permanent raging hurricane of air being sucked in. It had to be either floating free in space or lying flat on one of the moons. So how had the unknown wizard reached it to put his mark on it?
