The Brinefather's Promise
"It gleamed like the tide’s own heart, yet when he rose again, his eyes were full of salt and his breath was gone to the sea." -From the journals of Captain Levrick of the H.M.S. Indignant, found shipwrecked along The Battlement Cliffs.
The Brinefather’s Promise is not merely an enchanted ring but a covenant between mortal lungs and the bottomless hunger of the sea. Forged of sterling silver, affixed with a gleaming orb of sapphire, then cast in the salty waters of The Laughing Sea and left to crust and barnacle into a living crown, it glimmers faintly like a drowned relic pulled from a sunken shrine. To wear it is to court both blessing and doom, it grants the bearer the power to breathe beneath the waves and to move with the fluid speed of shark or seal, a gift sailors and smugglers would kill to possess. For those few who dare slip it on, the ocean opens like a second home. But the sea has no gifts without price. Each dive with the ring drags the body closer to its truest master. Salt begins to crust in the lungs, veins grow sluggish with brine, and thirst for immersion gnaws at the heart. Those who rely too often find themselves unable to breathe air at all, gasping and drowning on dry land while their comrades look on helplessly. Tales abound of men seen laughing and swimming like dolphins one day, only to be found the next morning stiff and lifeless on a beach, their lungs filled with seawater though they had never touched the tide. Across the ages it has surfaced in the hands of corsairs, drowned priests, and desperate rulers who sought dominion over the waves. None kept it long. The Brinefather’s Promise is a relic of seduction, a beautiful curse dressed in silver and salt, and though kingdoms and cults alike lust after it, those who wear it are doomed to discover the truth of its name. The sea does not bargain. It only collects.
Mechanics & Inner Workings
The Brinefather’s Promise is a barnacled silver ring, its surface roughened by sea-crust yet gleaming with eerie luster beneath the muck. At the crest of the crust formation at the top of the ring sits a gleaming sapphire gem, shaped into a perfect orb and seeded into the barnacles. Its enchantment grants the bearer the ability to breathe underwater as naturally as air, and to move through the sea with uncanny speed and grace, the body answering the current like a creature born of it.
But each use deepens a debt:
- Salt-Binding: Prolonged use leaves salt deposits in the lungs and veins, causing coughing fits, nosebleeds, and eventual suffocation on land.
- The Sea’s Claim: Frequent wearers report feeling parched on shore, their bodies yearning for immersion. Some cannot breathe air at all after months of reliance.
- Drowning Debt: If the ring is used excessively without reprieve, the bearer slowly drowns even above water, their breath replaced by brine until death.
Manufacturing process
The forging of the Brinefather’s Promise is traced only in fragments:
- A silver band was cast upon the seabed itself, cooled in the tide rather than flame.
- Barnacles and shell growth were left deliberately unpolished, said to “anchor the spell” in living sea-flesh.
- The final blessing was whispered by a cult of priests, whose chants called upon the Brinefather, an old oceanic tyrant of Aquian folklore now half-forgotten.
- Pearls ground into dust and mixed with whale-blood ink inscribed the inner band’s runes, ensuring the wearer’s lungs would be “turned to tide.”
History
Legends first place the Brinefather’s Promise in the hands of smugglers who trafficked relics between drowned temples off the coast of Kathar during The Lost Ages, long, long before The Great Schism. Sailors claimed whole crews leapt overboard to chase one ring glimpsed glimmering in a wreck. During The Civil Age we live in today, it passes into the possession of corsairs who used it to launch underwater raids against coastal strongholds. Each time, the ring’s bearer was lost at sea not long after, either drowned or gone mad from thirst ashore. One infamous case was Lady Mara Kestrin, a noblewoman turned cultist, who used the ring to live months beneath the tide, ruling a “sunken court” of devotees. When her drowned body was recovered, her lungs had hardened into coral, the ring fused to her finger.
Significance
The Brinefather’s Promise is feared and coveted alike. To navies and coastal lords, it offers an unmatched advantage in warfare and salvage. To cults and priests of the sea, it is a sacrament proving the ocean’s dominion over land. To common sailors, it is a curse, a ring that grants your wish to master the sea, only to give the sea back to you forever. It remains one of the most enduring relics of maritime lore, whispered about in taverns whenever a body washes ashore.
Creation Date
Unknown, but believed to originate centuries before The Fall, when god kings and desperate mortals bound pacts in the shattered coasts.
Rarity
Unique in form, though folklore hints at “sibling rings” forged by the same drowned priests. Only one has ever been confirmed.
Weight
Negligible, though sailors insist it feels heavier after long dives, as though water clings to it.
Dimensions
Standard ring size, its barnacles adding an irregular, jagged crown around its silver band.
Base Price
Incalculable. No captain or cultist would willingly sell it. To possess it is to risk its curse to be sure, but to possess in-turn its great many benefits.
Raw materials & Components
- Silver band cast in open sea.
- Pearls, crushed and used in rune-inking.
- Barnacle crusts and shell growth deliberately preserved.
- Whale-blood ink used in binding rituals.
Tools
Forged not in a smithy but in the sea itself, using enchanted tongs to shape silver underwater. The runes were inscribed with bone styluses, and the quenching was the tide itself. The final “tool” was the drowning of the head priest, their life ending as the spell’s anchor into the trinket.
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