A circlet and a blade, two markers of her greatest failures to protect her friends.
The bronze piece of metal, which she had manipulated her family to retrieve from that fateful final battle. She knew its every peak and curve, could have drawn it from memory a million times over from how often she had studied it and held it in the past weeks.
Beside it was a multi-hued gray blade with a faded green power symbol set upon a bronze hilt. She had picked up the blade when she used the locker to launch herself onto the airship, a final token to remember a great friend she had never been able to help in the end.
Neither of the items were really what she thought of when she remembered those friends, and if she had her choice, she would have given anything for them to return her friends back from beyond the veil of death. It was horrible how she could still see both of them, arriving just as they di- passed away. She knew that she had done everything she could have at the time to save them.
Picking up the circlet, ruby red eyes, bloodshot from days of crying watched as it pulled to the sword. Drawing a shaky breath, Ruby let it slip from her fingers and heard them clang together, and for a brief moment she thought she saw a spark of light in the hilt of the sword. A flicker of energy, which washed over her like a warm tidal wave of comfort. Sniffling, Ruby pushed back her red tipped black hair as she wiped her eyes dry again.
"I will stop her girls… I promise you," she told the two of them softly, her voice quiet and quaking with the emotions she was fighting down again. "I promise, she is not going to take any more friends, not if I can stop her."
Pushing herself up, she left them on her chest, slinging her backpack on. As she walked down the stairs quietly to meet with Jaune, Ren, and Nora, she didn't notice the ghostly forms reaching out to her from the circlet and blade. Both of the redheaded women she blamed herself for their deaths wanted her to know they held her blameless, and just wanted her to be happy again.
But the living could never hear the dead, and so a simple circlet clung to a intricate blade, the magnetic energy creating a soft charge to light up the power symbol of the cross-guard.