The Ring of Saint Mirelle’s Promise

Aura moderate abjuration and conjuration; CL 9th
Slot ring; Price 18,400 gp; Weight —

DESCRIPTION

Fashioned from pale silver touched with faint rose-gold veining, this elegant ring bears a central oval moonstone surrounded by tiny seed pearls resembling gathered tears. The interior band is engraved with an ancient phrase in Old Vallonic: “No darkness may claim what love still remembers.”

The Ring of Saint Mirelle’s Promise is traditionally gifted during the Hearthmother’s Vigil, a sacred Noirvallon observance honoring mothers, adoptive parents, wet nurses, caretakers, elder siblings, guardians, and all those who endured hardship so another might survive. In many regions of the kingdom, the ring is less a romantic token and more a declaration that the wearer is “one who kept the lantern lit.”

While worn, the ring grants the wearer a constant sanctuary effect against summoned creatures only. In addition, once per day as an immediate action, the wearer may absorb up to 30 points of damage that would be dealt to a creature within 30 feet whom the wearer considers family. This damage transfer ignores distance restrictions caused by darkness, fog, rain, or magical concealment so long as the wearer can perceive the target’s voice, silhouette, or presence.

If the protected creature would be reduced to fewer than 0 hit points by the triggering attack, the ring instead stabilizes them automatically and grants them temporary hit points equal to the wearer’s Charisma modifier × 3.

Three times per week, the wearer may cast status upon creatures they regard as immediate family. The effect lasts for 24 hours.

LORE

The origins of Saint Mirelle’s Promise are disputed throughout the marshlands of Noirvallon. Some accounts claim Saint Mirelle herself was not a saint at all, but merely a ferryman’s widow who remained behind during the Fever Floods to care for abandoned children while the healthy fled inland. Others insist she was a noblewoman stripped of title after sheltering plague victims within her estate against royal decree.

Regardless of which telling survives nearest the truth, all versions agree upon one detail: when the floodwaters finally receded, Mirelle was found seated beside an extinguished lantern with dozens of children sleeping safely around her. She herself had perished days earlier.

The rings first appeared shortly afterward.

In the older districts of Ville des Marais, it is customary for these rings to pass not from parent to child, but from caretaker to caretaker. Midwives give them to elder daughters. Soldiers leave them to younger brothers who raised siblings during war. Grandmothers entrust them to exhausted fathers. Among poorer families, possessing even a single Mirelle ring is considered proof that someone within the bloodline chose sacrifice over abandonment.

Some theologians quietly argue the rings function only because Reverie itself remembers acts of protection. They believe the magic does not originate from spellcraft alone, but from accumulated generations of grief, devotion, exhaustion, and stubborn tenderness layered upon the item through ritual remembrance.

CONSTRUCTION

Requirements Forge Ring, sanctuary, shield other, status; Cost 9,200 gp + 736 XP

Kelwyn’s Notes

There are many enchanted objects throughout Reverie which proclaim themselves instruments of power. Crowns which command armies. Scepters which split stone. Blades which drink souls with theatrical enthusiasm. Such objects are loud things - desperate things, more concerned with announcing their importance than proving it. This ring possesses no such insecurity.

One must understand that civilizations do not survive because of kings. They survive because somewhere, in some flooded home illuminated by failing candlelight, a weary individual chooses to remain awake beside another person’s suffering. History records the monarch who won the war. It rarely records the woman who kept six children alive through winter with watered soup and blistered hands. And yet one of these acts sustains humanity far longer than the other.

What fascinates me most is that the ring does not define “motherhood” through blood. Reverie itself appears to reject so narrow a philosophy. The magic responds instead to continuation - to those who preserved life, comfort, memory, dignity, or hope when abandoning such burdens would have been easier. I have seen one such ring worn by a grandmother, another by an elderly priest, another by a tavern owner who had quietly raised three orphaned goblins after a river fever carried off their parents.

The ring cared for none of these distinctions. Quite marvelous, honestly.

There is something deeply Noirvallonian hidden within that truth - the notion that love is not proven through sentiment, but maintenance. Through remaining. Through carrying exhaustion without permitting it to become cruelty.

A kingdom survives because someone continues lighting the lanterns anyway.