Contrary to those rocks she had collected as a child, these stones appeared to be hand crafted, rather than simply pulled from the earth. They could have been organized out by shape and marking, if the merchant had bothered to take the time. He hadn't though, and so they sat in a mixed mess. She presumed it was so that she would have a harder time producing two of the same kind, and noted how inconsistent their designs were in comparison.
There was a reason she had spent the day before researching soul crystals. It was a topic she hadn't truly breached until she had come across it in conversation at the arcanist's guild. Those teachings tended to branch off, she had been told, into two unique disciplines. Practitioners of either discipline would have been disgusted looking in the box.
Both the stones meant for a scholar or a summoner were crude in their craft. It didn't matter which she pulled out, they were all imperfect in their design, and branded with a poor rendition of each discipline's emblem. Worst of all, she felt no resonance with either of them. There was no soul in these crystals, either in the spirit of craft, or the spirit of an individual.
She paused her digging, looking up to consider the merchant. He had retained his confident manner, hands resting in his lap. The bead of sweat on his brow betrayed him. Every moment she looked further into the box worried him. She presumed that he had grown used to fools prodding his wears and buying whatever struck their fancy. By the time they could return demand a refund, he would have skipped town. She resumed shifting through the box's content. It hadn't escaped her mind that this would be a possibility. If it took a few tries to find a proper soul crystal, she would endure. No matter how long it to-
A chill ran down her spine as her hand ran one of the crystals near the bottom of the box. Her fingers curled tight around the stone, and the frost dug in even deeper. Her eyes darted about the room, trying to spot the person she was now certain was observing her. She stared at the merchant, and swore he was about to panic. The shadow behind him agreed.
Ripping her hand from the box, stone still clutched in a dead man's grip. She forced it out of her hand and onto the table, behind the box. The merchant tried to look around the box, to see what it was she had retrieved, before she glared at him. He shot back into his chair immediately. Agatha rubbed her hand. It felt as though if she were to look at her palm, the stone would have left a burning scar, but she knew that wasn't the case.
It sat innocently enough on the table. A jagged piece of an obsidian looking ore, emblemized with a dark red sword. She palmed it again, immediately shuffling it from the table to her pocket, hand burning the entire way.
"Price," she said, looking back to the merchant.
"Pardon?"
"The price for one," she repeated, watching him starting to stammer, "Give me the price for one, you damned fool."
He gulped, murmuring, "A thousand gil."
She stood, flinging her prepared payment on the table, and left the merchant. Her pocket burned. Even walking down the docks of Limsa Lominsa made her fingers curl from the pain. Every now and then she stopped with a shudder, and was forced to look over her shoulders to make sure she wasn't being followed. By the time she returned to her room at the inn, she felt forced to bury the crystal in a drawer, just to keep her distance.
Yet in her dreams, it seemed to call.
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