Garnet Fixed -

They arrived in a black sedan with diplomatic plates, speaking in a language Lina didn’t recognize but somehow understood. Their leader was a woman with silver hair and garnet earrings that matched the stone. She called herself the Collector.

She was seventeen, wiry from hunger, with calloused palms and the kind of quiet desperation that comes from watching your father’s workshop rust into ruin. The mine had been in her family for three generations, then closed when she was twelve. Now, she scavenged its tailings—not for gems, but for anything she could sell to the passing tourists who came to hike the gorges. garnet

It is a common misconception that all garnets are red. In fact, the only color garnet does naturally occur in is blue (though color-change garnets can shift from red to green/blue-green under different lighting). They arrived in a black sedan with diplomatic

That night, Lina learned the truth.