Life After Death

Quinn/Juliet: prepping proposal

{Quinn}

I had to propose to Mikaela. It had been in the back of my mind for a while, but I just wasn't sure how to go about it. She was... complicated. Confusing. Ever changing in various and strange ways. I had always assumed that my family would pick out the woman I would ask to marry me, namely, Adele. But I couldn't even pretend to go about it in the same way. Mikaela liked spontaneity; she liked the horrible oddness that came with not quite knowing what would happen next. And then these strange archaic human customs that had me confused. I only knew what Mikaela or Juliet told me. Why was a ring so important to the engagement anyway?

With all of this in mind, finding a ring that would suit Mikaela is a worthy of a lifelong quest. I knew that if she didn't like it, she could always shape shift it into something better, but I wanted her to like the ring I got her, at least enough to wear the original. The jeweler I went to was patient enough to let me see most of the collection. But even with all the rings laid out in front of me, I was at a lost.

Surely I knew the woman I was about to marry better than that.

"She's a picky one, eh?" the man said, looking down at the choices he had given me. I had already explained to him I was buying what Juliet had told me was an 'engagement ring.'

"Not really," I admitted. "She'd probably like something I made out of a bent wire."

"Then what's the problem, then?" he inquired.

I sighed, leaning against the glass of the counter.

"She's unpredictable," I said. "What she likes today might be different than what she likes tomorrow. I'm trying to find something that she'll keep forever."

Grunting, the man swept the whole of the rings back into the counter, reordering them with a quick spell. I would have protested, but he moved intently to the back of the jewelry store and then laid a small box before me.

"This is a bit odd," he said. "Because it comes in a set and all, but I think this will be what you need. They're magic rings." He opened the box and three rings twinkled against the black velvet of the lining.

"Magic?" I asked. One of the rings pulsed with a bluish glow; another had an onyx stone with bright red cracks and the last ring swirled with various colors, though I couldn't tell if the lighting produces such a glow or the ring itself.

"They complete each other," he replied. "And they have a communication spell between them."

Though I only needed one, I knew whom the other rings belonged to.

"It's not cheap," the jeweler warned as I pulled out my family signet ring. At the sight of it, he calmly gave me the price and I wrote it down, signing the certificate with my own name and then stamping it with the Guerre crest. He closed the box and took both it and the certificate to the back of the store.

A few moments later I was carrying a small black bag, wondering what I had just done to myself. Westley was waiting outside, looking bemused.

"You return to the land of the living," he chuckled. "And probably a great deal poorer too."

"We're living at her estate," I said. "The least I can do is buy a ring for the occasion."

We began walking through the crowd of the market region, getting bumped and jostled along with everyone else.

"So what are you going to do about Adele?" I had to nearly shout at Westley and for a moment, I still wasn't sure if he heard me.

"She's a nice girl," he called back.