The Rings of Yearning

The Rings of Yearning

Two ancient rings were discovered in a pair of uniquely well-designed C-Wing Ugly fighters, one in each cockpit.

The chronometers and hyperspace logs of both ships had been wiped clean of all data, other than their last entry, which indicated they had been on a two-month-long joint hyperjump beginning somewhere southwest of Chiss Space, far beyond the limits of the currently recognized Intergalactic Hyperspace Barrier [1].

One of each of the Rings was discovered almost embedded in place against the interior cockpit duraglass of the Ugly it was in, and the ships themselves were almost welded together at those points, cockpit glass against cockpit glass. It took a pair of fusion generators running at full power to pull the two ships and their ring-containing cockpits apart.

Force users from all reaches of the spectrum have spent the better part of a year studying the Rings. Taking into account the competing biases each group held on how the Force works, this is what they reported:

The Rings of Yearning, as they’re being called, are a pair of matched artifacts from a long-lost planet from beyond this galaxy, a planet known only by what can be discerned from the Rings’ makers as a small M-class planet called Despair (not to be confused with the prison planet Despayre, originally known as Horuz in the Horuz (System), where the first Death Star was built). At the time of the Rings’ creation millennia ago, the advanced civilization that inhabited Despair was highly skilled and had cultivated the Force quite successfully. Unfortunately, the inhabitants faced two interwoven problems: their planet was on a collision course with a rogue extrasolar body of immense size that was about to crash into them, ending all life as they knew it in a cataclysm of massive earthquakes and exploding volcanic debris; and, sadly, they had never mastered off-planet space travel, and would not be able to leave their doomed planet in time.

Realizing that their civilization was going to be obliterated, the citizenry agreed to prepare two artifacts to absorb all the knowledge they had gained from their millennia of existence, and to launch the artifacts into interstellar space, in the hopes that some distant civilization might find them and make use of their contained wisdom and experience.

One group, known as the Benefactors, took a massive block of pink granite, as large as a good-sized dwelling, and infused it with all of the Light side energy that they could gather, composed of all the lessons they’d learned about aiding those around them, of sharing with their fellow beings, and of the gratitude for the bounty that their lives had been blessed with. They then compressed the massive block of stone, now pulsing and glowing from within, into the shape of a small rectangular jewel, compact enough to fit on a large-ish Ring, known by the Benefactors as the Rubiyat Ring of Compassion. The Ring had the capability of resizing to fit almost any sized hand, from the delicate digits of an Ewok to the massive wrist-sized fingers of a Whiphid or Gamorrean.

While the Benefactors worked their powers, the rest of the planet combined together with a competing group known as the Benefiters, those who believed the world was theirs to control by right of strength and hierarchical position. They pulled together every lesson they’d learned about manifesting wealth and power, of controlling the world and the inhabitants around them, and of becoming one with the Domination that such wealth provided them. They poured every ounce of their certitude into an equally massive block of green marble, also shrunk down to a thousandth of its size so that it too could fit on an equally wearable Ring, one which they called the Conquering Ring of Compulsion.

Though only the Benefactors' Ring was actually one of Yearning, the pair have been identified by this combined name ever since the research has concluded.

There were interesting differences between the two stones. When gazed at with calm intent and a surety of the Lightside of the Force, the Benefactors' stone glowed and pulsed with billions of points of light from within, each light source corresponding to a soul from Despair that yearned to help someone else from off their planet, hoping to reach out through the Force to aid someone, anyone, in some civilization that might someday light years later find the stone drifting through interstellar space. In contrast, the Benefiters’ stone throbbed deeply and hummed darkly, and seemed to draw in energy from any and all sources within a very large range. Its power was provided by the burning desire of billions of souls once living on Despair, who ached for one last taste of power, one more guzzle from the well of an enemy’s defeat, one final draught of an opponent’s bitter subjugation.

Studies have shown that these two Rings can only be worn by a strongly adept Force user, and must be both worn together at the same time. The alignment of a potential wearer didn’t seem to matter, as long as they were very strong with the Force. It was said that even most Grand Masters weren't strong enough to wear the Rings; only those of exceptional Force mastery could wear the Rings without succumbing to their extraordinary potency.

One element of that potency was that the Rings of Yearning drained a significant amount of Force energy from their wearer, hour by hour. The effect of wearing both Rings was reported to be similar to carrying two heavy pieces of magnetically-infused metal, which simultaneously attracted and repelled the other continuously. It was this constant push-pull effect that supposedly drained the Force from any wearer, as they had to struggle to maintain a viable distance between the two Rings. Tests showed that this energy drain accounted for almost the entire amount of Force energy that a skilled Force user would regain on a daily basis. If a Force user didn’t regain enough Force energy to account for this loss, then the Rings would eventually leave them burned out like a spent battery or a powered-drown droid, unconscious and fully drained of the Force -- and often, it was said, drained of their sanity as well -- until the Rings were forcibly removed from their fingers.

But for those with enough mastery of the Force, the Rings seemed to function like a Force battery or even a Holocron: after a wearer had born the rings for a full ten-day period, they could draw on a stored well of Force energy equal to about half of what had been drained from them over the previous week or so, or about what a gifted Force user would have regained over three full days. When that amount of Force energy was expended, the Rings would have to be re-empowered over another tenday, before their stored energies could be tapped again.

It is said that the Rings of Yearning would also block any and all nearby attempts at using the Force Power known colloquially as Mind Trick, both for the caster as well as the target, while also protecting the wearer from all uses of Force Drain and Force Scream. In fact, one test suggested any casting of either of those two Powers against a wearer of the Rings had a chance to cause such Powers to rebound back against the caster, much as a blaster bolt could be redirected back by an adept lightsaber combatant. This redirection did not seem to be a decision of the wearer, but appeared instead to emanate from within the Rings themselves.

So valued and so sought after were the Rings of Yearning that dozens of fake copies have been created to profit from gullible buyers who had more cents than sense. More than a few were found to have been crafted and sold by the pirates based around Ord Cantrell. But a true Force user can instantly tell, even at a distance, that these two are the original article, from the intense desire wafting from them like incense of the mind.

The two original Rings, and the uncommon C-Wing Uglies they were discovered in, currently belong to famed collector and Force researcher Belloq Tull, who believes there might be a way of using the power generated between these two rings as some kind of Force dynamo. According to one rumor, Belloq is also attempting to use a recently discovered Sith Wayfinder, combined with an ancient Jedi Star Compass, to try to determine what deep space coordinates the C-wing Uglies may have originated from.