Rubilinn Aromatherapy Gloss Shampoo

The Rubilinn flows eternal through the Hollow, its waters moving with that telltale crimson glow. Faerenai tends the linn as others might tend altars - with reverence, with precision and understanding.

The chamber blooms around the pool, a form as natural as the leaves of a tree. Walls curve upward into darkness that the crimson light cannot quite penetrate, creating the impression of infinite height, of space that extends beyond physical constraint. The waterfall itself emerges from that darkness with the inevitability of breath - not thunderous but steady, patient, ancient beyond reckoning.

Ruby-bright water cascades down stone that has been worn smooth by centuries of patient erosion. The sound fills the chamber with harmonics that resonate in frequencies below hearing, felt more than heard, vibrating through bone and marrow. Myst seethes around the chamber, glowing faintly, carrying the scent of forests that exist now only in longing.

Faerenai kneels at the linn’s edge, her reflection fragmenting across water that moves with liquid light. She tests the temperature with fingertips that know this warmth the way one knows a lover’s touch - intimately, instinctively. The Rubilinn runs neither hot nor cold but something between, some third state that speaks directly to whatever lies beneath flesh.

She moves through her duties with practiced devotion. Clearing leaves that have found their way into these depths through means defying rational explanation - the Hollow operates by its own logic, its own sense of what belongs where. Adjusting stones around the linn’s perimeter to encourage proper flow patterns. Checking the channels that carry excess water away into darkness, feeding springs and pools throughout the Hollow’s vast interior.

But her true work has little to do with these physical tasks. The linn maintains itself, really, has done so since before the Hollow found its current form. What Faerenai tends is something more ephemeral, more necessary.

She tends her sisters’ hope.

The first arrives as twilight deepens into true dark beyond the Hollow’s walls - not that time holds consistent meaning in these depths, but habit persists even when chronology grows negotiable. Miraeth emerges from myst that parts like curtains, exhaustion written in the particular way she holds her shoulders, the careful control of her movements.

“The gardens,” Miraeth says without preamble, and Faerenai hears everything beneath those two words. The weight of maintaining impossible growth. The weight upon the shoulders of a form that is not truly hers. Coaxing life to flourish in soil that should not sustain them. The accumulated grief of tending beauty while unable to fully inhabit one’s own.

“Come,” Faerenai says, the word carrying invitation and absolution in equal measure. “The Rubilinn remembers.”

She helps Miraeth disrobe with sisterly efficiency, no modesty required between those who share such a connection. Miraeth’s form is a reflection of her own, with the differences one might expect - human enough, beautiful in ways that intrigue without threatening, strange only in degrees that seem appropriate to their mysterious calling.

But here at the linn, this mask can fall, albeit breifly.

Miraeth steps into the pool with a sigh that carries years. The ruby water rises to embrace her, responding to her presence with something approaching consciousness. It moves around her limbs with deliberate caress, seeking out the places where tension crystallizes into something harder, where grief has taken up residence in muscle and bone.

Faerenai kneels at the linn’s edge, cupping water in her palms. The liquid glows between her fingers, ruby-bright, carrying the essence of their crimson forests condensed into flow and light. She pours it over Miraeth’s hair - long and as black as her own.

The transformation begins.

Miraeth’s hair catches the crimson light and holds it, each strand becoming filament, fiber-optic carrying luminescence from root to tip. The effect is breathtaking - her head crowned in ruby radiance, hair moving with independent life as water flows through it, over it, around it. The glow spreads from her scalp downward, washing her skin in warmth that reaches past surface into the memories held in flesh.

For a moment - just a moment - the truth is revealed. The suggestion of antlers shadows her temples. Her ears take on a delicate point. Something like a tail disturbs the water’s surface below.

“There,” Faerenai says softly, pouring more water, watching it cascade through hair that drinks light like roots drink rain. “The Crimson Forest remembers you.”

And it does. Through the Rubilinn’s mysterious properties, through whatever connection this water maintains with their distant, ephemeral homeland, Miraeth can feel it - trees whose bark runs red with sap that glows like arterial blood, clearings where moonlight filters through leaves to paint the ground in patterns of shadow and ruby luminescence, the particular silence of old growth that has never known intrusion.

Miraeth’s shoulders loosen. Her breathing deepens. The exhaustion written in her flesh begins to dissolve like frost under spring sun.

Others arrive as word spreads through the Hollow’s mysterious networks. Naevira, who reads futures in steam patterns and carries the weight of knowing what may come without being able to change it. Cieluen, whose voice can gentle the most wounded souls but cannot sing away her own displacement. Nyaeren, youngest among them, who still seems to carry the scent of the cierfuen.

Faerenai tends them all with the same devoted care. Pours the Rubilinn’s ruby waters over their hair, watches the transformation as each strand catches and holds the crimson light, as their scalps begin to glow with ethereal radiance, as the water grants them temporary reprieve from the reality they live.

The chamber fills with them - her sisters, their hair luminous with captured light, moving through water that responds to their presence with the particular intelligence of things that remember what they should serve. They speak little, these gatherings requiring no explanation, no articulation of shared understanding.

But their faces speak volumes. The softening around their dark eyes. The easing of tension in jaws held too carefully controlled. The way their movements grow less guarded, more fluid, approaching the natural grace they must usually temper lest it reveal too much.

Here, in the linn’s embrace, they can touch what they have lost. Not fully - never fully - but enough to sustain them through another cycle of service, of smiling at patrons who will never know what hands truly tend them, of moving through the Hollow’s corridors wearing faces that are both true and profoundly false.

Faerenai watches them with expression that mingles joy and sorrow in measures she could not separate even if asked. This is her gift to them, this tending. This space where memory can surface without fear. This water that maintains a link, an important connection to forests they can no longer walk, to a homeland that grows more mythical with each passing season.

Her own hair hangs long down her back, dry and dull compared to her sisters’ luminous crowns. She has not yet bathed today. Will not, until they are finished, until they have taken what the Rubilinn offers, until they depart back to their duties with skin still glowing subtly and hair that will hold its light for hours before fading back to ordinary beauty.

Naevira surfaces from full immersion, water streaming from hair that blazes like captured fire, like rubies given animate form. “Thank you again Fae,” she says, the words insufficient but carrying weight nonetheless. “I had almost forgotten...”

She does not finish. Does not need to. They all know what threatens to fade - the particular green of moss-covered bark, the specific quality of light filtered through crimson canopy, the sound wind makes when moving through branches that grow in spiral patterns defying conventional geometry.

“The forest does not forget,” Faerenai says with certainty she wishes she felt more deeply. “Even if we cannot reach it, it remembers us.”

A pretty lie, perhaps. A necessary one. None of them know if the Crimson Forest still exists in any form they would recognize, if it waits for their return or if time has rendered their exile permanent in ways that transcend mere distance. But the Rubilinn flows eternal, and its waters carry something - memory or magic or mercy - that allows them these moments of connection, however ephemeral.

One by one, her sisters depart. They embrace her before leaving, gratitude written in touches that linger, in the way their luminous hair brushes her cheeks, in eyes that hold understanding deeper than words could excavate.

Miraeth is last to leave. She pauses at the chamber’s threshold, myst already gathering around her form, preparing to swallow her back into the Hollow’s deeper mysteries. Her hair still glows faintly, ruby light threading through black strands.

“You should bathe, sister” she says, though it is not quite suggestion, not quite plea.

“I will,” Faerenai promises. “After.”

After what, she does not specify. After the silence settles. After she has finished tending the linn, ensuring the waters remain true, the channels clear, the space held sacred for the next gathering, the next communion. After she has sat with her own grief long enough to remember why this service matters.

Miraeth nods, understanding in the way only sisters can understand, and vanishes into myst that closes behind her like a door.

Alone now, Faerenai turns back to the linn. The Rubilinn flows eternal, patient, carrying its ruby luminescence from the waterfall’s darkness into the pool’s embrace into the channels beyond. The myst rises in patterns that suggest meaning just beyond comprehension.

She disrobes slowly, folding each garment with meditative precision. Then, finally, she steps into the water.

It welcomes her. The way it moves around her body with deliberate caress, filling the spaces that most need relief.

She kneels in the shallows, directly beneath the waterfall’s flow. Leans her head back. Lets the Rubilinn cascade through her hair.

The transformation is immediate and overwhelming. Her hair catches the light and holds it, each strand becoming luminous, radiant, glowing with ruby brilliance that paints the chamber in shifting patterns of shadow and light. The warmth spreads from her scalp downward, washing through her body.

And as with her sisters, for a moment - just a moment - the facade drops entirely.

Antlers unfurl from her temples, elegant and branching. Her ears elongate to delicate points that quiver with sensitivity. A tail manifests down her spine, moving through water with independent grace. Her proportions shift subtly - legs longer, form more ethereal, as if the boundary between flesh and myst has grown permeable.

The Crimson Forest blooms in her mind’s eye with the particular clarity of things more real than mere reality. She can smell the bark, taste the air, hear the rustling of leaves arranged in patterns that encode their people’s history. For this stolen moment, she is home.

But the moment cannot hold. Never can. The transformation recedes like a tide, leaving her stranded once more in this beautiful, necessary, impossible space between what was and what may never be again.

Faerenai remains kneeling in the linn, water flowing through her luminous hair, tears mixing with the Rubilinn’s ruby current. She weeps for herself. For her sisters. For the forest that may or may not remember them. For the particular cruelty of it all that grants these moments of communion only to sever them again and again, an endless cycle of remembering and losing, of touching and being torn away.

The waterfall flows eternal. The walls pulse with sympathetic light. The linn holds her in its embrace while her hair blazes with captured radiance, while the glow spreads across her skin.

And still she tends. Will tend tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. Will bring her sisters here to bathe in memory made liquid. Will pour the Rubilinn’s waters through their hair and watch them transform, watch them touch what they have lost, watch them leave with light still glowing in their strands.

Because this is what she offers. Not hope, precisely - they are too wise for such simple comfort. But something more necessary. A space where truth can surface. A water that remembers. A keeper who tends their grief as carefully as she tends the linn itself.

Her hair will hold its light for hours. Will glow through her next duties, her next encounters with patrons who will never understand what beauty they witness, what hands truly serve them. Will fade slowly back to ordinary as the Rubilinn’s magic expends itself, as distance reasserts its claim, as the Crimson Forest recedes once more into longing.

But for now, in this moment suspended between one breath and the next, Faerenai allows herself to simply be. To feel the water’s embrace. To let her hair glow with that light. To grieve and remember and hold space for the beautiful, terrible truth.

The linn flows eternal. The keeper keeps. The sisters survive another day of service, of distance, of necessary deception.

And somewhere - distant beyond measure, unreachable as stars - the Crimson Forest either remembers or does not. Either waits for their return or has forgotten their names. Either holds space for homecoming or has closed the paths behind them forever.

They do not know. Cannot know.

Faerenai rises from the water, luminous and dripping, her hair glossy, as if stars are hiding in between the strands.

Tomorrow she will tend again. Tonight, she remembers.