The Surgeon and the Ring

Unknown Speaker

Welcome back to the Frightengale Files, where old spirits linger and each tale seems to reach out from beyond the veil.

Florence Frightengale

Indeed. Tonight's story comes from among the wretched halls where life and death once danced in uneasy proximity. A place smeared with whispers of things unnatural.

Unknown Speaker

I have spent my life—and my afterlife—surrounded by blood, bone, and the wretched souls who tried to control them.

Florence Frightengale

But there was one—

Unknown Speaker

Ah, one man.

Florence Frightengale

Yes, one surgeon, who dared to challenge the immutable laws of life and mortality.

Unknown Speaker

Who thought he could master death by feeding it something far darker. His name was Dr. Edwin Vale.

Florence Frightengale

And his tale, I dare say, begins with a symbol—

Unknown Speaker

No, no, not a symbol, Florence. A cursed artifact, worn brazenly on his hand.

Florence Frightengale

And what he wore... it still taps in the dark. Shall we begin?

Florence Frightengale

In the autumn of 1883, Dr. Edwin Vale arrived at Hollow Hill. With that cursed artifact glinting ominously on his hand, he wasn’t just another practitioner of the healing arts. No, he was something far darker.

Unknown Speaker

A scalpel of a man. Sharp. Dazzling. Too... too precise, even for a surgeon. And his confidence, let’s not forget his confidence—it dripped off him like... well, blood from a blade.

Florence Frightengale

A fitting metaphor. He called himself Dr. Edwin Vale, and while his demeanor garnered attention, it was what he wore that whispered its own chilling tale.

Unknown Speaker

The ring.

Florence Frightengale

A thick gold band with a black stone, polished smooth. Striking, yes—but unsettling. He claimed it was a gift... from a mentor in Vienna.

Unknown Speaker

A mentor whose very existence was, ahem, untraceable. Convenient, I'd say. Too convenient.

Florence Frightengale

And under gaslight, the ring gleamed. It seemed almost alive with its reflection...

Unknown Speaker

Like it breathed. No ordinary ring.

Florence Frightengale

Nothing about Dr. Vale was ordinary. His surgeries—oh, they were miraculous. Too miraculous. Wounds that should have festered healed overnight. Hemorrhages... stilled by his very touch. The nurses called him divine.

Unknown Speaker

Divine? Hah. It was unnatural. It had to be. He operated tirelessly, flawlessly, as though exhaustion didn’t exist in his world. I... I can almost see his gloved hands now, moving in eerie synchronization with the sparkling ring.

Florence Frightengale

And yet... there was suspicion. Whispers in the halls. A feeling, shared but unspoken, that this brilliance was borrowed. That something, or someone, lurked beneath Vale’s steady hand, guiding him.

Unknown Speaker

Lurking... yes. Because, brilliance comes naturally to some of us. But that kind? It comes at a price.

Florence Frightengale

And Dr. Edwin Vale... he was already paying. Though the cost had only just begun to reveal itself.

Unknown Speaker

That ring—it’s strange, isn’t it? How desperation clings to such objects, as if they promise salvation. And yet, that promise—oh, it’s always laced with unseen barbs.

Florence Frightengale

Desperate times, invite desperate measures. And those measures often come... disguised. Maybe a surgeon's amulet?

Unknown Speaker

Precisely. And I—I remember one. A field surgeon during the Crimean War. Carried an amulet—copper, it looked like, though oddly tarnish-free. Rumors whispered through the tents. They said it healed wounds quicker than stitches or salves ever could.

Florence Frightengale

Copper… untainted by bloodshed? Curious. Did anyone dare ask—

Unknown Speaker

No one *dared* ask! Florence, the man was... revered. Like, like some infernal saint. Soldiers lined up outside his tent, hoping that, somehow, his touch would save them from the reaper’s scythe.

Florence Frightengale

But did it, Elijah? Save them?

Unknown Speaker

For a time, the wounds—gaping horrors from musket balls—sealed within hours. The feverish grip of gangrene? Snuffed out before it could creep across flesh like wildfire. It was astonishing. Too astonishing.

Florence Frightengale

Astonishing… and yet unnatural. Surely there were signs?

Unknown Speaker

Signs? Hah, there were whispers. His tent would glow faintly, pale green, in the dead of night. And the amulet… it would hum. Soft. Almost soothing... until you realized it didn’t stop humming, not even when he wasn’t there.

Florence Frightengale

So it wasn’t just the surgeon who carried its presence. Those relics always seem to... seep, don’t they?

Unknown Speaker

Seep is one word. But there was something... off about the way the men healed. Their scars—they left marks shaped... like veins branching out from the wound, thin as hairlines. Dark. Spidery.

Florence Frightengale

And what became of these men? Men who bore the scar of his miracles?

Unknown Speaker

They—they didn’t last. Weeks after their wounds healed, infections consumed them. Their eyes clouded, lips muttered names that no one had spoken aloud.

Florence Frightengale

And the surgeon?

Unknown Speaker

Vanished. One night, his tent empty. The amulet gone. The scars remained, though… seeping through the whispers of that camp as if they, too, carried his absence.

Florence Frightengale

It’s a familiar story, isn’t it? Gifts that heal, but hunger. Curses wrapped in gold or copper or glistening jet. They beg to be worn, Blackwood—but once worn, they rarely let go.

Unknown Speaker

It's always the same isn’t it? Objects that promise salvation but demand a toll. This ring, for instance—what they first noticed wasn’t the suffering, no. It was the healing. Wounds that should’ve taken weeks to close? Healed in mere days. And the bleeding… it would slow, almost before it began. As though, hah, as though blood itself obeyed his ring.

Florence Frightengale

Obeyed, yes, but at a cost, these miraculous recoveries hid darker truths. Did they not?

Unknown Speaker

Oh, they did. Because, almost as if recoiling, the healing wouldn’t hold. Wounds burst open days later, crawling—

Florence Frightengale

Crawling, as though something inside the sutures refused to rest. Patients would wake screaming, clutching their bodies, raving about sensations... something watching from beneath their skin.

Unknown Speaker

Yes! Yes, one woman, God help her—

Florence Frightengale

Mary Clarke.

Unknown Speaker

Ah, yes! Mary Clarke. She screamed that... that someone was beneath her ribs, Watching. Always watching. Her eyes—they glassed over like she was staring at something none of us could see. And her voice—it wasn’t her voice anymore. It...

Florence Frightengale

It wasn’t her own. The nurses told me her cries echoed long after her lips fell silent. As though her suffering had... hung in the room, staining it.

Unknown Speaker

Staining, yes. But Florence, Florence—it wasn’t just the patients. It turned on him too. Dr. Vale, the brilliant surgeon with the unerring hand? He began to forget. His memory… it frayed like old stitching. He’d hold his own surgical notes, trembling, whispering, “Did I do this?”

Florence Frightengale

And yet the ring remembered. Didn’t it?

Unknown Speaker

Oh, it did. It pulsed beneath the gaslight, Breathed. Like a vile heart... syncopated by its own design. And heat, there was heat. You—you couldn’t touch it without feeling as though it was burning through you.

Florence Frightengale

Burning... and alive. Utterly alive. Artifacts like these, they don’t merely... exist. They hunger. They linger. And Vale had become their servant.

Unknown Speaker

A servant? Hah, no. No. He was its… accomplice. Willing, at first, but now... a man chained to his own ambition. And we—we were witnessing the chains tightening.

Florence Frightengale

Blackwood, this talk of Vale and his ring—it reminds me of another relic. It moved silently through the convalescent hospital where I worked years ago. At first, the patients celebrated their scars sealing perfectly, too perfectly. But beneath those pristine wounds.... what stirred within was anything but healing.

Unknown Speaker

Ah. Another cursed trinket? Tell me, what foul object held sway over them?

Florence Frightengale

A silver brooch, small but ornate. Shaped like a crescent moon, its edge sharp enough to cut. It began as a gift, a token passed between nursing sisters who believed it had—

Unknown Speaker

Healing properties. Let me guess!

Florence Frightengale

Precisely. At first, it was simple scratches that vanished within hours, as if the skin itself had forgotten to bleed. They marveled at it. Stitched their hopes to it. But over time, the brooch demanded more than superficial wounds.

Unknown Speaker

Objects like these do escalate, don't they? What was it? To what gruesome heights did it climb?

Florence Frightengale

It began with the nurses themselves. They’d wear it for hours, and days later, they’d find crescents etched into their palms. Thin, deep lines that their flesh refused to heal. One young woman swore she felt it... biting at her.

Unknown Speaker

Biting. Hah! As if it had teeth?

Florence Frightengale

So it seemed. Patients under their care began reporting dreams of shadows… crescents flickering just at the corner of their vision. And some went further, drawing those shapes in their delirium, over and over again, until their fingertips bled.

Unknown Speaker

What kind of madness grips men so entirely? I—I’ve seen soldiers mutter prayers before death, but this… this sounds like the brooch was infecting their minds.

Florence Frightengale

It wasn’t just their minds. They grew cold. Disturbingly cold to the touch even as their fevers raged. I believe it was... nesting in them, entwining itself in their bodies. And when it couldn’t hold any longer...

Unknown Speaker

It left its mark. Didn’t it? The relics always leave something behind.

Florence Frightengale

They do. The brooch left its victims gazing blankly as death claimed them. Blank but smiling—as if the agony had gifted them some secret joy. And beneath their flesh, crescent-shaped bruises remained, fading slowly, far too slowly...

Unknown Speaker

Bruises, relics, cursed adornments—all symbols of hungry forces lingering just beyond our reach. And yet Vale wore his with pride. An accomplice, you called him. Strange how easily ambition blinds men to their chains.

Florence Frightengale

Ambition—and desperation. Like the nurses clinging to that brooch, Vale became a vessel for his ring. But while they suffered in silence, he began to crumble.

Unknown Speaker

Crumbled indeed. And that ring... well, it wasn’t done with him yet.

Florence Frightengale

Vale’s decline... it wasn’t abrupt. At first, it was subtle—an unsteady hand here, a misplaced thought there. But like a chain pulled too tightly, his mind and body began to strain, the cracks spreading with every passing moment.

Unknown Speaker

And how they widened. The man who once commanded the scalpel with the precision of an artist began questioning his own sanity. I—I can see him now, clutching his surgical notes, mumbling, "Did I do this? Was this me?" Can you imagine?

Florence Frightengale

It wasn’t age that eroded his mind. It was... absence. A void left by something else, something the ring stored in his place. And yet, somehow, that wasn’t enough for it.

Unknown Speaker

No, it wasn’t. The hand. God, his hand! Rotting while he lived. Black veins snaked through his flesh, splitting it... forcing it open, as if something inside was trying to break free.

Florence Frightengale

The ring was angry. That much is clear. Vale must have felt its fury... feeding on him when he refused to feed it. And in his desperation, oh, he tried everything to rid himself of it. Oils, knives, prayers...

Unknown Speaker

Even fire He—he burned his own hand, hoping the heat would force the band loose. But the ring... hah! It clung tighter, as though mocking him. And all it left him with was charred flesh and agony as a companion.

Florence Frightengale

Agony... and terror. His colleagues reported hearing him weep softly in the quiet halls. And then came the night he disappeared.

Unknown Speaker

Locked himself in the chapel, didn’t he? They thought he was praying.

Florence Frightengale

But prayer did not save him. can you picture it? Two days later, curled before the altar. A husk of a man. His knees drawn to his chest, his soulless eyes staring at nothing... hollow.

Unknown Speaker

And the hand! Ah his left hand. Gone. Severed cleanly, as though something... some unseen surgeon had reclaimed it.

Florence Frightengale

But that's not all, is it? His mouth... his mouth was filled.

Unknown Speaker

With surgical thread! Stuffed so densely inside that... hah! I can’t even imagine how he drew his final breath. The ring silenced him, Florence! It used the art he had mastered to gag his very soul.

Florence Frightengale

To control him one last time. And then… the ring was found.

Unknown Speaker

Still warm. Still gleaming. Waiting. They buried it beneath iron and salt, didn’t they? A lead drawer in the old apothecary wing. There it rested—or should I say, lurked.

Florence Frightengale

Lurking, yes. Because even sealed, its presence remained. Staff whispered of phantom sensations... pressure in their left hand. Some woke to find their palms bleeding. A perfect circle drawn by some unseen force.

Unknown Speaker

And the tapping, don’t forget the tapping. Those nights when the nurses swore they heard sharp, deliberate knocks. Three of them, hollow against the wood, coming from nowhere and... everywhere.

Florence Frightengale

It seeks a new wearer—a hand to claim, a soul to consume, Object #024 does not rest.

Unknown Speaker

No. Rest is for the dead. And this cursed ring? It’s something far worse than dead.

Unknown Speaker

it haunts me: how does something forged by hands—gold, lifeless and inert—find the will to want? To linger, to choose, to hunger? Tell me... what does it mean for an object to grow ambition? want something? How does gold, lifeless and forged, grow ambition? Desire?

Florence Frightengale

It doesn’t grow it. It carries it. Such relics aren’t born from metal—they’re... imbued. Something presses itself into the object, whispering, bending, urging it toward its purpose.

Unknown Speaker

Whispering, yes, but with intent. It’s the intent that terrifies me. I mean, we we assign will to men, to creatures. But for a cursed band of gold to have will of its own?

Florence Frightengale

Not just will, Hunger. These objects, when they’re born of desperation or tragedy, take on a kind of echo—

Unknown Speaker

An echo? it’s far more deliberate than that. Echoes fade. These relics... they grow sharper. Stronger. I I’ve seen artifacts like this, you know. They don’t fade into myth. They carve out their own stories through flesh and misery.

Florence Frightengale

Like shadows that stretch long after the light dies. Objects of pain are never passive, Blackwood. They... respond. They find those already trembling on the edge and push them into the abyss.

Unknown Speaker

Push? More like drag. And the ones they latch onto—hah, it’s never about merit. It’s the desperate, the reckless, those foolish enough to believe they can wield what’s already chosen them.

Florence Frightengale

Chosen, yes. But rarely saved. Relics are parasites. They don’t just demand devotion—they consume purpose. They redefine their host, carving them into a tool for whatever twisted design they harbor.

Unknown Speaker

And yet... we reach for them. Humanity, always reaching—thinking we can can master the unmasterable. Vale thought he could bend the ring’s curse. But in the end, hah, he was bent by it.

Florence Frightengale

Because relics don’t bargain. They... dictate. And those who wear them aren’t just wielders. They’re conduits. Puppets. Driven by desires they don’t even realize aren’t their own.

Unknown Speaker

Hah, and what about the ones who resist? The fools who think they can walk away from such power unscathed? I I’ve seen what’s left of them. Burned hands, severed fingers, scars carved so deep they look like warnings etched into stone.

Florence Frightengale

Warnings rarely heeded. These objects, these curses wrapped in gold or silver or iron, they don’t simply end lives... they taint them. Every decision twisted, every action bent until the bearer... isn’t themselves anymore.

Unknown Speaker

And we—we, the bystanders of such horrors, we call them victims. But are they? Or are they complicit? Willing, as you said, Florence, until it’s too late?

Florence Frightengale

Willing, at first. Always at first. Desperation blinds reason. It’s why relics find fertile soil wherever ambition blurs morality.

Unknown Speaker

Ah, morality be damned, this isn’t just about cursed trinkets. It’s about what they reveal: the darkness we already carry. The questions we’re too afraid to answer.

Florence Frightengale

Or too afraid to ask. Tell me—what haunts you more? The ring’s hunger… or the man who wore it?

Unknown Speaker

The man. Always the man. The ring may whisper, may hunger, but it only finds soil in minds already teetering. And Vale—his obsession was the perfect crack, the ring didn’t create it... it devoured it. His hunger fed the curse, until it consumed not just flesh, but the fragile threads tethering him to sanity.

Florence Frightengale

It’s a tale older than we care to admit. Objects like these—they echo humanity’s darkest inclinations. They whisper to our ambition, our desperation... our arrogance.

Unknown Speaker

Hah, arrogance. Florence, that’s the crux, isn’t it? The belief, insane as it is, that we can wield such power without consequence. That we can stand before the abyss and, somehow, not fall in.

Florence Frightengale

But the abyss always calls back. And when it claims you, it doesn’t simply take... it reshapes. Just as Vale was reshaped, carved into something far less—and far more—than a man.

Unknown Speaker

Carved, yes. And left broken, discarded like a surgeon’s cracked scalpel. But the ring—hah! The ring endures. Waiting. Watching. And somewhere, there’s another hand... trembling to wear it.

Florence Frightengale

Another hand... and another soul. Dear listeners, heed this story well. For cursed objects care little for history or warning. They only care for their next bearer. And if you hear tapping in the dead of night—three soft knocks—

Unknown Speaker

Pray it’s the wind.

Florence Frightengale

Pray.. and listen no further..

Florence Frightengale

Until next time…Keep your instruments clean. And your relics… sealed.