Ring Time

Another wet and windy afternoon, and a few more rings emerge from the workshop.

Some rings are clearly artefacts manufactured by ordinary, if highly-skilled, craftsmen, wrought from recognisable materials, worked with familiar techniques, and used and well-worn over long reaches of time. Some are now in need of conservation and care, but some are as indestructible as a steel hubcap.

Others would seem to be the work of magicians, conjuring impossible, other-worldly things.  In this case, a torus of bright, mobile water in which two miniature trout swim, eternally.  That's one cabinet in the museum that won't need hydration, at least.  Just a supply of fruit-flies, to encourage the trout to leap periodically into space and fall back into their watery domain, to the delight of younger visitors.

And in this third case, the ring contains a roiling furnace of crystalline, cold fire, full of shape-shifting faces and figures.

In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare seize the fire?

To paraphrase Ted Hughes' Crow, "Mine, evidently".  [Cue maniacal laugh...]