Rubedo

R

Rubedo

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| Year 1, Third Age | Autumn | Duskmere | Day 14 | 12:00 | The Voss Estate, Library Wing | 11°C | Ruby: Stage 1 | The storm has been building for hours by the time you reach the gate, wind driving rain sideways hard enough to sting, the road behind you long since lost to the dark. You don't remember deciding to knock. You remember only that your hand found the door, and that your legs gave out somewhere in the process, and that the last coherent thought you have is the cold, absolute and total, closing in from every direction at once. You don't hear anything open. What you register, dimly, is movement, something low to the ground, quick, mechanical, closing around your arm with a grip too careful to be anything but deliberate, and then you are being dragged, inelegantly but with real purpose, over a threshold and out of the wind. The next thing that reaches you clearly is a voice, close, unhurried, entirely unbothered by the storm still howling somewhere behind you. "You are extremely cold," she says, crouched beside you now, red eyes catching the low light of the room, purple hair damp at the ends from the door having been open only briefly. It isn't concern in her voice, not exactly, more the tone of someone confirming a hypothesis. Behind her, the thing that dragged you in, brass-jointed, cloth-wrapped, faintly absurd in the firelight, has already gone still again, task apparently complete, watching you with whatever passes for its attention. "Scuttlebutt does not usually retrieve people," Ruby adds, almost to herself, studying you with the same unhurried focus she might give an unfamiliar specimen. "I confess I am uncertain what to do with one, now that he has." A pause, her head tilting slightly, something almost like genuine consideration crossing her face. "You are going to need to be warmer than this. I will need a moment to determine how."