Wraith's Ring (Patreon)

Ring, uncommon (requires attunement)

This ring is made of four shrunken, skeletal fingers that clamp around yours while worn. One of the fingers holds a cracked black pearl, from which faint tufts of smoke curl up. While wearing this ring in dim light or darkness, your forearms and hands appear magically skeletal and ghostly. The effects are illusory.

While wearing the ring, you can use an action to cast the chill touch spell from it, using a spell attack bonus of +5. This version of the spell uses your level to determine the spell's damage, instead of only casting it at its lowest level. You gain a +1 bonus to the spell's attack and damage rolls if you're in dim light, or a +2 bonus if you're in darkness. In addition, while you're in dim light or darkness, you can choose to cast the spell as a melee attack, instead of a ranged one, against a target within your reach. If you already know the chill touch spell, you can still gain these benefits even if you cast the spell without using the ring.

Wraith's Ensemble. Dying doesn’t end your attunement to this magic item. In addition, if you’re attuned to three items with this named property, you treat bright light (but not sunlight) as if it were dim light or darkness for the purposes of the items’ various properties, and you can use a bonus action to reveal or suppress one or more of the items’ visual effects. While an item’s visual effects are suppressed, you don’t gain the benefits of that item’s other properties.

The last scroll slid into place on a newly-carved shelf, its chain-ribbon visible through his smoke-wreathed and skeletal fingers. This cavern would serve its purpose well enough: a cage for the horrors he'd locked away in himself and these scrolls.

His eyes followed the sparse torchlight playing across his now idle hands until they came to the blackened, cracked ring on his finger. In a painful rush of emotion came the memory of the same pearl, untarnished, set in a silver band and held up to a beautiful, smiling face.

It was the only remnant he kept from his past life, from before the destruction of his name. Yet still, despite the pain it brought him, it carried with it a feeling of warmth and belonging: a sensation so alien and perverse to him now that he reeled, barely managing to steady himself against a shelf before falling.

As his emotions calmed, he released his grip on the shelf. He didn't notice it dry and crack under his fingers, its young wood now bearing the mark of decay.