Heaven and Earth Gauntlets
The Sidereal Violet Pearl foresaw that the future of her beloved brother — the warrior-mendicant Ajni the Undying — was beset on all sides by troubles, and so forged a pair of smashfists that would see him safely through what fate had in store for him, folding her familial love into the orichalcum she worked. Armed with his sister’s gifts, Ajni wandered Creation fighting for justice. He shattered the fortress of the Flying Devil Kings, bested a golem of jade and sorcery in a sparring bout, and diverted the course of the living mountain Mostath away from a village with a single blow.
The same love that drove Violet Pearl to craft the Heaven and Earth Gauntlets also led her to save her brother from the Usurpation, stealing him away in the space between seconds and guiding him to a place of safety deep beneath the world. He might have lived forever in that refuge, but his heart could not abide injustice. He returned to the world after centuries to avenge his fallen brethren, and eventually fell to the spears of the Wyld Hunt.
Violet Pearl has kept a careful watch over the gauntlets since her brother’s death. Intercepting his killers, she stole both the gauntlets and the Wyld Hunt’s memory of them. She has secreted them in an ancient, obscure shrine of Venus, Maiden of Serenity, awaiting a new wielder worthy of taking up her brother’s mantle.
Until now, where Venus ordered Titiana Botticelli, chosen of Venus and Conservatrix of the Lapis Ewer, to trade the gauntlets for Everlasting Descent, and to bring the gauntlets with her, to Nexus, where they were purloined by the visiting exigent of pickpockets, Shastaga The invisible. He was, however, crippled by gambling debts, and in a fit of irony, the Capo Cadence-of-stars-falling of the Tang Zen refused him the ability to pay back his debts with the gauntlets, instead, insisting he fight her with them the next week, at a pageant for the local crime lords.
The infernal defeated the exigent, putting a bloody and messy end to his life, or so it appeared, and passed on the gauntlets to a new challenger, one Akodo "The Golden Lion" Rokku, but that's a different story.
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