Terri felt light headed, in the past few hours she'd been killed, resurrected, and had stolen a very valuable, probably magical, ring from a desiccated corpse. To now hear that the organisation she belonged to was suffering from a decades long corruptive influence was a bit too much to bear. "I think I'm going to go home now, to see my friends and lie down for a bit." She went to stand up but then quickly sat down again.

The professor smiled gently at her. "Yes, it is a lot to take in I expect. Let me get you something to settle your nerves." He got up and retrieved two glasses and a large bottle from a cabinet behind him. After pouring two generous portions he put the stopper back in the bottle and pushed a glass over to the young cleric. Terri gratefully accepted and took a hearty swig of the amber liquid. It had a strong flavour of smoke and felt like it was burning her throat on the way down. By the time it reached her stomach however, the young woman felt a warm relaxing glow spreading out through her body. After a deep breath she was ready to ask another question.

"I don't understand why you got me to retrieve the ring when you could have done that yourself and used my life debt to send me on this other mission. It doesn't make any sense."

"No it doesn't," the professor replied, "unless I couldn't actually retrieve the ring myself, and that you were one of the few people who could."

"Why me?" Terri asked. "I'm not anyone special."

The professor laughed. "You were able to retrieve the ring because of your bloodline, because of who your grandfather was. You're right that it doesn't make you anyone particularly special, but it did make you particularly useful. Tell me, what do you know about your grandfathers?"

"Almost nothing," Terri replied, "my mother's father died well before I was born and my Dad never told me anything about his father. He told me he'd never forgive the bastard for abandoning my grandmother when she was pregnant."

"Well," said the professor, "I happen to know quite a bit about one of your grandfathers, probably your paternal grandfather from the sound of things. Let me tell you the story of Dartaniel the Black."

The professor then launched into an abbreviated history of one of the greatest mages to ever walk the corridors of Gravenhall. He left out the numerous advances in magic that Dartaniel had been responsible for, and also neglected to catalogue any of the many adventures he'd been on. What he did emphasise was that Dartaniel's magical brilliance had only been matched by both his libido, as well as the complete lack of morality with which he had indulged it.

The professor took a small sip from his crystal glass before continuing. "Everyone at Gravenhall knew he'd fathered bastards all the way from here to Dwarvenhome and back again, but that didn't become important until after he died. You see the randy bugger became sentimental in his old age and placed an enchantment on his magical ruby ring to ensure that it could only be removed by one of his many descendants and no one else. People tried of course. He hadn't been in the tomb more than six hours before we found the first of many rogue corpses beside his sarcophagus. The ruby ring was just too tempting to resist. Eventually though, word got around about the lethality of his magical protections and the attempts at thievery stopped. That was when I borrowed a magical scroll from one of my mage friends and used it to find out about the exception for family he'd put into the enchantment. Since then I've been directing every cleric recruit I could find into that tomb in the hope that one of them would be Dartaniel's descendent. For that reason the 'cleaning up the graveyard' task has become rather overused and repetitive these past few years. I've made sure that every candidate encountered the same situation you did, two zombies and an open sarcophagus."

Terri's jaw dropped in shock. "Ogden's beard! How many clerics did you send to their deaths before it was my turn?"

"Oh don't be so melodramatic Terri," the professor replied, "every single one of those clerics got to make the same choice you did. They were only ever in danger if they decided to steal a very expensive looking ring from the finger of a dead wizard. Every single one of them knew it was wrong when they tried it too. I'll bet you winced as you slid the ring off his finger, sure that something terrible was going to happen."

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Terri considered the professor's argument for a moment before replying, "I still believe that what you did was wrong."

"Of course you do, you're a cleric of Avandar. My god Aganthe on the other hand has a much more liberal view of morality. She also favours the greater good over the needs of any particular individual, which is something I'm in complete agreement with. Unless I'm mistaken, this ring is going to be very important to the greater good."

"Why, what's so special about it?" Terri asked.

"I don't know yet," the professor replied, "but my intuition has been telling me to get hold of that ring for a long time, and intuition is usually Aganthe's way of telling me what to do. Now that I've got my hands on it I'll be able to start a proper investigation of its capabilities. If nothing else, the ruby itself is massively valuable as a potential store of magic."

"That also doesn't make any sense," Terri answered. "If a simple chunk of quartz can save my life and teleport me to Gravenhall, why bother using something as rare as a ruby to store your spells?"

"Ah," the professor replied with a smile, "I can see that Aggy has been neglecting your education in the area of magical theory. Let me fill in some gaps."

The professor then explained why precious stones (and some of the non precious ones) were so valuable to the mage community. For reasons that no one, not even Dartaniel the Black, had been able to determine it was impossible to place permanent enchantments on anything other than diamonds, sapphires, rubies, emeralds and a selection of less precious stones and minerals such as quartz. Collectively these gems had become known as 'sorcery stones' and trading them was a lucrative business, especially for the dwarves whose mines were the chief source of the more potent varieties.

A sufficiently powerful mage could easily charm another person into being their friend for life but they couldn't enchant a sword to make it permanently sharp unless there was a sorcery stone embedded in the hilt. Ingenious mages tried grinding some of the less powerful stones into powder and mixing that into the steel when it was made, but they found that violating the integrity of a sorcery stone rendered it useless. The stones were graded by the potency of the magic they were able to contain. Size, purity and clarity were all important factors but ultimately it was the type of stone that had the most effect on its capacity. Diamonds were best, followed by rubies, sapphires, and then emeralds. Quartz was somewhere near the bottom of the list.

"Which is why," the professor continued, "there is no way the amulet around your neck could possibly have been responsible for pausing your body's descent towards death and transporting you back to Gravenhall, and of course it didn't. Quartz is one of the cheapest and least potent sorcery stones, which is why we use it for all of our Gravenhall amulets. What quartz is very good for however, is storing communication magic.

"When someone wearing a Gravenhall amulet suffers a potentially fatal physical trauma, the magic within the amulet is activated. The quartz then sends a magical signal back to Gravenhall which in turn activates spells bound within a truly enormous diamond. Not far from where we now sit, on a pedestal, in a dark room, is a diamond the size of an ostrich egg. It is the magic enchanted into that diamond that put your body into a state of suspended animation and brought you here. After that you were healed by one of our higher level clerics and put in the room down the hall to recover.

"I'm not often called on to allocate 'death tasks' any more, but I made sure that I'd be notified if you were ever transported here so that I could get you to retrieve the ring for me. The only downside is that I'll have to take care of the death task you were actually going to be given. Luckily it wasn't anything particularly difficult, something or other about healing the mayor's rampant syphilis. Truth be told, you saved me a lot of trouble by almost getting yourself killed tonight. I had just begun the development of a particularly convoluted scheme to manipulate you into stealing the ring for me, and now I don't have to go to all that trouble. Either way it's a small price to pay in return for this ring, the ruby is easily the most perfect I have ever seen and though the size limits its capacity somewhat, it also makes it easily concealable, which can come in very handy."

The professor picked up the ring from where it lay on his desk and stared at it, as if pondering the powers it might contain. Presently he looked up and spoke again, "And now it's time to get to the business at hand. I need someone to investigate a mystery for me in Valleros and I'd like that person to be you."