Ruby and Gold

Tourmaline’s light was a glittering gold thing. She sewed with it, infusing her dresses with sturdy enchantments; to make the wearer feel beautiful, make them more skilled or smart or in love, allow their crops to thrive as long as they wore the dress to water them.

Tourmaline’s magic too could heal. When her sister fell and split open her knee, Tourmaline had directed the light into a long flowing form like thread and used it to stitch up the wound. Her hands were swift like graceful dancing butterflies as she moved them with each flow of magic. 

Her sister had winced against it, a dark glittering magic had oozed with the blood from the wound, trying to consume the gold. Tourmaline hadn’t baulked. She’d forced her sister’s hurt silent. But a black stitched scar remained on Ruby’s knee, instead of the gold light dissolving into patched smooth skin.

It was no wonder that Ruby’s magic had manifested in such a way, they said. She was rumoured to be the offspring of a fae king. Their mother didn’t deign to mention him, but that sight of the scar on her daughter’s knee. The black angry scar. That was his magic in her daughter’s veins. His blood.

Tourmaline, their mother had wailed, and the golden girl would run to comfort their mother. And Ruby would stand. And stare.

Now, those dresses are so beautiful and hard to find that even a single square of them sells for hugely high prices. And the way to tell a Tourmaline Lake is by solid fabric quality, and shimmers of gold woven through it – her magic, known as gemlight.

Ruby looks just like her except her hair is dark. She works for ‚Buttons and Roses‘ tailors, but her real occupation lies in the burlesque house on Midnight’s Lane.

Ruby’s magic is dark and glittering like a velvet sea of silver stars. And she too has a dark allure like a kind of twilight. Her workshop is full of vials of blood and potions – black and blue and yellow. The last I knew, she used them for research. Or to track down her father. But now she counts each one, and marks the blood vials with tallies in a notebook. She scratches tightly curled letters onto parchment.

The room is full of relics. The vintage shoes under the desk – the ones her mother used to wear. The one’s Ruby now dons so deliberately.

She clicks her teeth and looks up at me. Asks about her sister, although she doesn’t seem to care.

As she smiles bitterly- I notice the jewels on her neck are strung together by a web.

Glittering and black. With hidden shards of white that looks suspiciously like bone.