The Gloves of Sparkle

The lost gloves of the goddess of fire, commonly referred to as “The Gloves of Sparkle,” are an artifact of great significance and power in Eden. Purported to have been worn by the goddess while she was putting the finishing touches on this world—which she’d crafted mostly with her bare hands—the mythical Gloves of Sparkle were eventually discovered to be very, very real.

During The First Age—while surveying the rainforest which covers the foothills of Dükuhüo Aüki—the halfling explorer Lüe discovered this lost treasure inside an abandoned hut.

As the story goes, Lüe brought the gloves back to the Emerald City for safe-keeping—perhaps to be displayed in a museum of some sort—but they were never seen again. Legend suggests this was because no one who encountered the gloves could lift them to put them on, no one but Lüe.

Description

These powerful magical garments appear, at first sight, to be little more than an ordinary pair of ladies’ hand gloves. It is only when they are used in the act of creation that they give off their famous sparkle.

That sparkle is purported to be a most dazzling sight to behold, a shimmer of thousands of colors that is mesmerizing to any and all onlookers.

Scholars who have studied Lüe’s accounts of the gloves prior to her donation of them to the United Countries of Oz believe that the sparkles may in fact be some sort of defense mechanism, a way of distracting the unprepared onlooker from gawking at the act of creation itself—a sight believed to be too awesome for mortal beings to behold.

Construction

It was just prior to The Calamity which brought the six-hundred and sixty-fifth iteration of reality to its end that Phina, the goddess of fire and chaos, created Eden. She made the place as a safeguard against her sister Mira’s rage, a postapocalyptic paradise for those beings who survived the destruction of their universe.

But as she made it, she realized that she could control naught but fire—that she couldn’t create a whole world by herself, not without her sister’s help—and so she reached out to a pair of ríxtan and asked them for their help. If those shapeshifting beings would sacrifice themselves to take the form of a pair of gloves, then Phina could transmute her fiery power into other elements.

The ríxtan agreed, and the rest is history.

Capabilities

The gloves allow the wearer to transmute any elemental magic they possess into the element of their choosing. If the gloves are worn by someone other than Phina herself, it is believed that they will activate the latent Potential in the wearer and grant them—albeit temporarily—the powers of a goddess.

Why “temporarily”? Well, it is believed that that much power coursing through the veins of an ordinary sapient being will kill them before long.