Out of the corner of my eye, I peered at the blue-silver ring on my finger. That strange, wild rose stared back at me like a haunting memory. Before he gave me that ring, Ahriman said, “We are in Etronia.” There must have been significance to those words.

Another one of Ahriman’s statements flashed through my mind, “A gift equal to a revelation of a fundamental universal process.” To Ahriman, there must have been little that could be equivalent to the value of such knowledge. It had taken him a long time to come up with a prize that would be equivalent to my revealing the nature of space and time.

I pulled the ring slightly closer to my eye and dared to imagine what the ring could be. The ring bore the name of Etron and the crest of the “wild rose.” On the Life of Etron spoke of a magic ring worn by the Hero, and it claimed that the ring bore the crest of House Polaris. The ring I wore on my finger, could it be the Ring of Etron?

A strong motivating force of curiosity filled my body, and I gripped the reins tightly in one hand and, with the other hand, frantically fumbled for the book on the seat next to me. I reached down to my book of history and started flipping through the pages. I had almost given up when, on the very last page, I found an illustration of the crest of Etron. Holding the crest in one hand and the ring in the other, I compared the two. They were a perfect match.

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I laughed darkly as the significance of the ring hit me like a freight train. Upon my finger, I wore the ring of the man who saved the world. I remembered how Ahriman retrieved the ring. That stone box Ahriman held in his hand could only have been one thing: Etron’s coffin. The ring had been looted from the Hero’s corpse just hours before.

My mind was filled with a mixture of elation and anxiety as I returned my history book to its resting place on the seat next to mine. The Ring of Etron was an artifact of great power, but it could bring ruin if used without caution. Just about every noble in the country would kill to acquire that ring. It had political value in addition to its value as a magic item. Merely having the Ring in one’s possession would grant a would-be king some legitimacy.

In a “War of Thorns scenario” where I was unable to prevent an Etronian civil war, I could use the Ring as a political bargaining chip. Hopefully, that situation would not come to pass, and I’d be able to stabilize the political climate of Etronia within the next five years.

I took the reins back in both hands and tried to turn my attention to other matters. The Ring of Etron could be a useful political tool, but it only served me as a weapon of war at that moment.

After several hours of deep thought, we arrived at a small inn located about a dozen miles south of Etron. The sign hanging above the door read, Mitrikov’s Respite.