The Gem of Loyalty
BlackSand Warrior Gauntlet
The skull of Master Alhuan hung at Jabir’s shoulder, its green flame dimmed, listening.
Below, the sand moved with a pattern older than war: two figures orbiting the jagged boulder, one with a blade, one with a shield, and a jaguar threading between them like a black comet. The crowd’s noise rolled up into the royal box in waves, but Jabir filtered it away. Noise was just heat. He was here for shape.
He kept one palm lightly on the armrest of his chair, feeling the faint pulse of the runes beneath the stone. The vault was already awake. It could sense what was coming.
“Watch,” Jabir murmured to no one.
Alhuan’s skull turned slightly, its tether flickering. “The cat?” it asked.
“Both,” Jabir replied.
He had seen many fighters die. Most left nothing behind but residue. This one, Victor with the jaguar, was different. Their movements weren’t trainer and beast. They were synced. Two halves of one pulse.
It meant the death would come in a pair. It meant the soul-thread would taste different.
He waited.
Below, the jaguar leapt. Missed. Struck again. The crunch of bone. The purple haze flared.
Jabir leaned forward, eyes narrowing a fraction. Not at Victor. At Tad.
The shield was moving like nothing else in the arena. Not reaction. Not defense. Anticipation. Even from this distance, Jabir saw its slight, delayed hum. Not a ward. A mind.
The skull pulsed green once, low. “A relic,” it murmured.
“Not a relic,” Jabir whispered. “A partner.”
Then the kill. Victor’s blade dipped, then faltered. Tad’s rapier slid clean under the helm.
Victor folded beside the boulder like a banner lowering itself. A breath later, the jaguar’s chest rose once and stopped.
The haze began to rise, slow and violet, curling from both bodies.
Jabir exhaled once, slow and deliberate.
Now.
He touched the red gem at the center of his turban and whispered a word older than the Waste. The runes beneath the box brightened, green laced with violet.
In the vault below, a crucible flared to life on its own.
From the sand, a thin double-thread of soul-essence rose. Two strands intertwined, one bright violet, one silvered-black. They didn’t scream. They drifted.
Jabir reached out with a finger, just enough to guide the threads down into the hidden lattice beneath the arena. He didn’t look away from the fight as he worked.
Alhuan’s skull tilted. “A twin capture?”
“Rare,” Jabir said softly. “Bonded death. Useful for binding, companion constructs, or studying loyalty without command.”
He closed his fingers. The threads obeyed.
In the dark beneath the arena, the crucible filled itself with liquid. The outer layer glowed a deep, bruised violet shot with thin red veins. Inside, silver spirals wound in twin helices, crossing and uncrossing like breath.
When it cooled, it looked like no gem Jabir had ever made. A metallic oval pulsing as though it still had a heartbeat.
He would catalog it later:
Name: Victor Eliminator & Romeo
Tags: Loyalty / Mourning / Bonded Soul
Use: TBD
He imagined its resonance: clean bindings, sentient constructs, the study of shared will. This was not power. It was a thesis. Exactly what he needed.
Back to the Box
Jabir rose only when Tad turned toward the gate. The man didn’t celebrate. Didn’t smile. Didn’t even look at the crowd. He crouched by the jaguar for a heartbeat, then walked away.
Jabir’s eyes narrowed.
The shield on Tad’s arm pulsed once, faintly, as if in answer to Jabir’s stare.
Alhuan’s skull hissed. “That one’s shield...”
“I saw,” Jabir said.
“Will you take him?” the skull asked.
Jabir’s lips moved just enough to form a word. “Not yet.”
He watched Tad disappear into the tunnel, cloak trailing, crowd screaming his name like a prayer they didn’t understand. He could already feel the echo of Tad’s resonance. Still alive. Still closed.
Victor and Romeo had given him a gem unlike any other.
Tad and the shield might give him something rarer still.
But not today.
Patience. Always patience.
He sat back down, robes unwrinkled, turban flawless, and let the vault hum quietly beneath his feet.
Entered by: 0x6424…79B4
The Chain That Refused
BlackSand Warrior Gauntlet
The crowd roared. Jabir did not blink.
From his perch above the arena, the world unfolded in slow, precise arcs: violet haze coiling upward, dust peeling from ancient stone, a rhythm of war and grief playing out below like a tide.
He sipped once from a chalice of duskroot wine. Not for taste. For timing.
Below, Justice Hacker stepped forward. Not arrogant. Not hungry. Just... braced.
And across from him, dragging a chain half her weight, was Bernadette.
“She smells of old decisions,” Jabir murmured.
Alhuan’s skull hovered closer, the green flame inside dim. “What kind?”
“The kind that linger,” Jabir said, his eyes never leaving the sand.
She didn’t posture. Didn’t play for the crowd. Her flail dragged behind her like a sentence already spoken.
Justice said nothing. Just set the saw in motion, its teeth whispering instead of roaring. There was no need for theatrics.
Then the first clash. Flail met steel. Not in contest, in contempt.
Jabir watched as Bernadette used her whole body with each strike: knees, elbows, shoulder, chain, rage.
No rhythm. Just refusal. Not a fighter seeking glory. A woman sculpting her last moment.
“The chain moves with her,” Alhuan observed.
“Not with her,” Jabir corrected. “It moves like something remembering.”
When Justice cut through her flank, she did not flinch. When he shattered the links, she smiled, not with triumph, but with recognition.
She was being unmade exactly as she intended.
When the final blow came, a brutal arc of saw through shoulder and spine, Jabir did not rise.
He only extended one hand. His fingers hovered above the armrest, reading the pulse in the runes below his seat.
The floor responded. The vault awakened.
Bernadette fell. Chain slack in the sand. Her blood steamed where it touched the rune-lines hidden beneath the arena floor.
The soul-thread began to rise. And Jabir finally stood.
Vault of the BlackSand, Hours Later
Silence in the stone. No torchlight. No sound from above. Only the slow hum of entropy wards, keeping death exactly where it belonged.
Bernadette’s body hovered above the salt-thread weave, suspended in a cradle of quiet magic. Her flail, split, twisted, inert, lay beside her on a separate slab.
Alhuan’s skull floated beside Jabir, silent for once. The Onyx Wolf sat in the far corner, unmoving.
Jabir extended his hand. The soul-thread answered.
It rose from the chest like breath returning home, pale green, tinged faintly with rust-colored smoke.
But halfway through, it snagged.
Jabir narrowed his eyes. “Something's holding it.”
A second, thinner thread, not soul, not memory, something between, rose from the shattered flail. Coiled. Anchored.
He adjusted the rune circle.
Alhuan’s voice crept into the stillness. “It’s not a curse. More like loyalty.”
Jabir shook his head slowly. “It’s a sentence she chose for herself.”
The thread resisted. It wasn’t violent. Just... slow. Like sorrow trying to become speech.
Jabir stepped closer. He did not yank. Did not sever.
He whispered the Rune of Dissolution, an unbinding, gentle and exact.
The flail’s fragment glowed once, dimmed, and released.
The full thread surged into the center of the ritual circle. Emotion rippled outward in thin, flickering layers.
The outer light trembled, dark red, uneven. Not burning, but spoiled. Pain left too long in silence.
Within it, a pale silver cord turned over itself again and again. Unsettled. Not resisting, just unable to rest.
Jabir watched without comment. His fingers moved slowly, carefully, guiding shape without forcing it.
Jabir began the shaping. His hands moved in deliberate, rune-taught patterns.
The gem formed. But it did not cool.
The silver refused to settle. It spun against the runes, dragging the red with it. The outer shell trembled. Not cracking. Resisting.
“She died as she chose,” Jabir murmured. “But not cleanly.”
Alhuan said nothing. Even the skull’s glow dimmed, unsure whether to intrude.
Jabir laid one fingertip against the forming gem. Not to still it. To witness it.
“I curate endings,” he said softly. “But this one... still echoes.”
He let it spin. Let it resist. Then, finally, he whispered a single syllable of containment.
The gem sealed itself. The spin slowed, not into rest, but into a long exhale.
He placed it onto the basalt shelf, slotting it beside three others marked RED, GREEN, COIL. Then he wrote the tag, with one word he rarely used.
Name: Bernadette, Leveler of the Rune Raiders
Tag: Punishment / Refusal / Grief
He stepped back. The gem pulsed once. Faint. Imperfect.
A soul that had refused to forgive itself, even in the moment it was freed.
Alhuan’s voice came soft. “She carried the chain, but it carried her too.”
Jabir didn’t respond. There was nothing else to say.
He left the Vault without ceremony. Without a word to Verus. Without summoning flame or chant.
Some deaths were not for fire. Some just needed quiet.
The arena above still echoed with names. But down here, in the Archive of Endings, Jabir filed another soul away.
Not with triumph. With respect.
And a note to himself:
"Do not use this gem unless the ritual can bear the weight of memory. It is not power. It is regret. Refined. Preserved. Ready."
Entered by: 0x6424…79B4
