Aldo's fire-ward ring

A plain gold band that hung on a thin silver chain at the neck of the one survivor Koa found alive in the webbed basement under Wraithblade Keep, a hand from Dwayne’s wiped-out crew, barely breathing. Aldo took it, and held it over the forge: the heat brought up writing that had not been there before, in a primordial hand he could make out and could not read.

Worn, it answers once a day to a spoken word. It gives the wearer resistance against fire, and if the fire reaches him in that same moment he goes out of sight altogether for five rounds, a pyrotechnician’s trick more than a ward. Aldo had carried it a good while and half forgotten it. It mattered in Loshev, where he traced a smell of sulfur to a townhouse fireplace and went up the chimney after the invisible thing in it: fire-resistant and out of sight himself, he shot it dead from below.

The ring was never given a name of its own, and the word that wakes it was never written down.