Long ago in a time of endless war, there lived a young girl in a town. One night, during a particularly nasty raid by an unknown enemy, the girl fled to the forest of her family. Losing herself during the panic of her flight, she stumbled her way into the darkness of a cave. The girl thought all was lost, when she believed to see the light of a fire glowing nearby. Creeping closer to the fire she found a rock in its place, a great cluster of red coals the size of both her fists. Upon removing the cluster she found soft sand underneath, as if the cluster of embers was shaped especially for her.

Using her makeshift lantern as a guide, she left the cave, no longer stumbling through the darkness of the night. The bright crimson light did more than just illuminate dangers, or so it would seem, as the girl managed to evade every threat to her life on her journey home. She encountered bears and dire wolves without so much as a scratch where they should have torn her to shreds. She took it to be a good omen and carried onward.

She was greeted with open arms upon arriving home and, after explaining her situation, her family praised the cluster of garnets to be a blessing from some sort of higher power. In the coming years, the family of the young girl slowly rose to fame in all Bavaria for their mysterious magical carbuncle that granted the family safety and protection during the hardest of times. The young girl married a sweet young man, bearing two daughters, the eldest of which determined that the family should transform the carbuncle into jewels for the family to wear, backed with many carat gold stringed with pearls. The woman, no longer young, agreed, and it was passed on to the eldest daughter after her death.

All seemed well in the household, until the carbuncle set was passed down to its founder’s youngest daughter. When the news spread to the town of the mystical carbuncle being passed to another, younger family member, a particularly greedy young man saw an opportunity. See, he had a hunger for power, and his closest gateway to power was through getting close to the carbuncle and its impenetrable caretakers. So he eventually charmed the young heiress, marrying her and bearing her two daughters.

The first daughter had the hunger and greed like her father, who encouraged her nasty behaviors and irresponsibility, and hungered for the carbuncle. As her mother grew in age, and gained the jewels from her Omi’s, her grandmother’s, will, the evil daughter saw her chance and took it. Her mother, already skeptical about her first daughter’s intentions, allowed her to plead her case.

She only said these words:

“Omi would have wanted me to have it.”

The mother of this greedy woman, grandmother too early by her, would have granted her her wish, had it not been for the visit her younger daughter had made the previous day. That visit, her daughter brought her her baby granddaughter.

The grandmother now compared the purity and blank slate of her youngest granddaughter to the sticky, tart evility of her eldest daughter, and paused. Her eyes had been opened. After pondering, she told her daughter thus:

“As the holder of the carbuncle, upon my death the jewels will go to my youngest granddaughter.”

When her ungrateful eldest inevitably threw a fit, throwing the entire household into an uproar, she continued her sentence.

“And, as of now, you are no longer my heir. You and your ferocious brood must leave and never return to the safety of the garnets we hold dear.”

And so, the evil eldest daughter went into hiding alongside her malicious father and her brood, cursing her family and the curse of the hardened blood, the redded seeds, the garnets of the Ichor Carbuncle.

And the victory of the family would be celebrated for generations to come, with the collection of garnets being passed down with each bearer’s death to honor the choice made by the carbuncle’s founder.