When the mysterious elf Teclis founded the Colleges of Magic in Altdorf, he named the human sage Volans as their first Supreme Patriarch, and it is Volans whose name the Ring of Volans still carries down the centuries. The ring is at once an office and an armoury: it passes to whoever holds the title of Supreme Patriarch, and each bearer feeds a measure of raw magic into it, so that after generations of wizards it holds a reservoir of stored power that no single spell could ever match.
To the Empire of Man, the ring is the visible sign of the eldest and mightiest of its magisters. In desperate straits its bearer may draw upon the hoarded sorcery of every Patriarch who came before, unleashing in a heartbeat magic that would take a lifetime to gather anew — a last resort kept for the darkest hours of the realm.
But the ring remembers all who wore it, and not every Patriarch was wise or kind. Some who slip it on report the whispering of dead sorcerers crowding at the edge of thought, each pressing his own long-buried designs upon the living mind. To bear the Ring of Volans is to carry the counsel of the ages — and to guard always against the two centuries of ambition sealed within the metal.
The reliquary continues
