The Ball

“Some artefacts resist scrutiny. Others resist dignity. This one resists everything except the girl who refuses to surrender it.”

— Seraphis Nightvale, Librarian of The Last Home

Relics may be born from wars, dreams, gods, or accidents, but every one of them carries its origin like a scar. The Ball does so with cheerful indifference. Neither weapon nor ward, and possessing no patience for scholarship, it exists solely as the fiercely loyal companion of Rika Thunderale. I write this entry not because the Ball desires explanation, but because the Library insists I document anything capable of launching itself through supporting beams with enthusiasm.

The Shape of the Sphere

The Ball is a perfect sphere of living gold measuring precisely forty-one centimetres across. It is warm to the touch, as though remembering a forge long vanished from the Pattern. Beneath the fingers it yields in the faintest muscular flex, suggesting vitality rather than metal, yet no mark has ever been left upon its surface. Steel glances away. Spells lose their nerve. Lars, whose grip has unsettled stone, once attempted to shift it and learned humility instead.

Glyphs wander lazily across its skin. They move only when unobserved, assembling playful images of bounding spheres, clenched fists, and the word MINE written in seventeen scripts that predate half the Realms. The Ball hums with a soft resonance that unsettles books on their shelves, and that resonance deepens whenever Rika approaches. It never quiets for any other hand.

As Though It Were a Toy (It Isn’t)

The untrained eye sees only a gaudy trinket—an oversized bauble from some forgotten beach-world carnival. The trained eye realises it is the same thing, only vastly more dangerous. Its mass alters according to Rika’s intent. In her arms it is no heavier than breath; left upon the floor, it becomes as immovable as a mountain that has given up on hospitality.

The drifting glyphs hint that the Ball once served as containment for something older and less cheerful. Whatever its original purpose, it has long since traded vigilance for mischief.

Flight, Trajectory, and Structural Offences

At the slightest flicker of command—come, strike, guard, return—the Ball traverses space with the eagerness of a siege engine let loose on a feast day. Stone abandons its pretence of durability. Timber remembers its arboreal youth and decides upward is the safer direction. The courtyard still bears a flawless concavity, perfectly circular and wholly unapologetic, marking the Ball’s history of abrupt landings.

It responds only to the simplest forms of intent. Anything nuanced is greeted with bland indifference. Despite this, its precision carries the air of something ancient indulging the earnest enthusiasm of its keeper.

Stillness, and the Limits of Will

When Rika places it upon the ground with the serene instruction, “Stay, good ball,” the artefact becomes the most obedient object across every Thread known to the Library. Attempts to move it—whether through Freya Ironfist’s enthusiastic strikes, Lilith Bloodpetal’s elegant manipulation of ley-lines, three carefully calibrated lift-spells, or Lars’s formidable grip—have all ended the same way. The Ball remains precisely where it was left, while all those attempting to interfere find themselves in varying degrees of horizontal retreat.

The courtyard stones now display a perfect and deepening impression of its resting place. When Rika returns, the Ball rises gently to meet her hand, serene in the certainty of her ownership.

The Weekly Contest

Once each week, when the taproom falls into its soft nocturnal hush and the moons lend a pale, attentive glow, Rika carries the Ball into the courtyard and announces, “Your serve, little hammer.”

The Ball, for reasons it has not shared with the scholarly community, agrees to behave temporarily as a conventional object. Freya strikes first. She always does. She mutters—just loudly enough for the courtyard stones to hear—that she is “only doing this because someone has to keep the girl from flattening the building,” though the quick, sharp gleam in her amber eyes betrays a fierce enjoyment she would sooner be catapulted through a wall than admit aloud.

The Ball retaliates with exuberant precision. The courtyard, long resigned to this ritual, prepares itself for structural inconsistency. Glyph-marks shimmer across the Ball in radiant figures that tally the score, visible even from the highest casements. Their glow conveys unmistakable delight, as though the relic enjoys pretending, briefly, to be ordinary.

The final rally concludes only when a nearby beam succumbs to fate. The Ball drifts serenely back to Rika’s palm, absolved of all destruction the moment it touches her hand.

Attempts at Study, and the Consequences Thereof

There have been eleven formal requests to study the Ball in depth. There have been eleven refusals. Wards unravel into contrition. Time-halt weaves result in acrobatic ricochets across the rafters. Dimensional exile lasts only four heartbeats before the Ball returns from nine sealed voids to hover above my desk in pointed silence.

A single attempt at confiscation endured six hours and forty-three minutes. Rika’s grief echoed through the Inn so fiercely that the Hearth went out and three panes of coloured glass collapsed in sympathy. Throughout this, the Ball clung to her chest, matching its resonance to her heartbeat with unsettling precision. I withdrew once it became clear that the relic’s loyalty exceeded my patience.

Rika’s conclusion is always the same.
“My Ball.”
This is not argument. It is doctrine.

A Ruin That Collapsed Rather Than Explain Itself

The ruin from which the Ball was claimed has folded inward, as though embarrassed. By moonlight the sands there trace the word AGAIN in seventeen dead languages, each glyph large enough to match an oni’s stride. The drifting symbols upon the Ball hint—only fleetingly—at a sealed essence. Theories range from a destructive weapon-core to the compressed remains of a battle-deity whose enthusiasm exceeded its caution. My preference is the quietest: it is an exceptional ball, and we impose profundity only because we dislike admitting ignorance.

And yet its hum is too precise, too knowing, too pleased. Whatever it was, it has chosen Rika Thunderale as its keeper. In doing so, it has found permanence.

Final Thought

A relic is defined not by what it reveals but by what it refuses. The Ball refuses scholars, containment, extradimensional exile, and common sense. It has never once refused her.

That alone makes it remarkable. And faintly unsettling.