>>6111492But never in all the journals or references or books or scholarly letters is there mention of a Blackstone that has any colour. The hint remains in the name. The idea that one could shimmer with a faint hue seems to deny that moniker, an oddity.
Perhaps another thread. The Shimmering that Jove was exposed to, the crystalised specks of Wrack, places where the world has scabbed. The fields grow from enormous expenditure of Threshold energies, the Other peering in close. Perhaps if we had not warded, guarded and sanitized this site we left behind here, the world would eventually snap at the edge and the Wrackcrystals sprout. Material mundanity cannot bleed but if it could, the odd mutifaceted crystaline structures you find in the Wastes at times would perhaps be the lubrication of the fine structure of the universe, seeping in through the cracks in creation. It kills you. In untold ways. You are a machine entirely dependent on endless rules and systems and metabolic pathways and finnicky hormones and precise sodium balances and you are uniquely suited to the biosphere you roam within, a scrap of meat that thinks itself a blessed thing. When the rules that permit your existence begin to bend, you bend before you break, and the Shimmering fields of the Wastes are but one of the little signs of the Wrack.
Here, in the High Wastes, we are further in than many. Go further still and the Deep Wastes are profound oddities of geography. Shimmering fields that stretch like countries, stretches of sand that feel like graveyards and - if the whispered stories are to be believed - Wrackcrystal pillars that pierce the skies and holes in the world that things fall through. Though that's all hearsay. People who have actually braved the Deep Wastes are few and far inbetween. The area simply isn't hospitability to life as we concieve of it.
But for all that, the Other is a known quantity. The rainbow hued dots in the air, the ghostlight that curls around the crystals, the Shimmering it leaves - all that is Potential, before it crytalizes into Wrack, and so you curve back around, brushing up on basic theory.
Fireglass is Wrackcrystal formed -right-, a moment in time, a perfection of possibility. A fuel source, a boon, a trade good, the reason to brave this hostile place.
Wrackcrystal is the scars of creation healing itself.
So Jove was exposed to the Shimmer Fields and dying, his entire being twisting apart. Leeching that bound whorl of energy off of him into the Blackstone must then - logically, if such applies - have imbued the Blackstone with a purity of potential. It is, in a sense, almost become a fleck of Fireglass held in Icarus hand. But unlike fireglass, which is rigid and must be processed by alchemineers to unlock the potential within and serve as a base for the wonders of modern science, the Blackstone appears to have simply absorbed the potential. And it's holding it even now. Inert, somehow, not crystalised, not bending into Wrack.
