Fragments

Introduction

In Atharen's earliest days, the living gods experimented with their own divinity to create sentient life. The result of repeatedly experimenting with severed scraps of their divinity, and fusion with ether, was the Noradac, or Spirits in common terms. They were the foundational building blocks that led to the creation of the mortal races. The Noradac are diverse in their physiology and vary from a wide range of shapes and sizes. Despite their differences, one thing unites them: Divinity. They are all made from a portion of their creator's divinity, crystallized within a shell of ether.

Some Fragments are made from the calcified remains of Noradac, and occur naturally throughout Atharen. These fragments are often referred to as 'Arcanacrags', because of their applications in relation to magic. Other Fragments are the result of mortal meddling and are born from the stolen essence of mages. This latter variety is commonly referred to as Sunderscraps because of its application in Sunderring. Both have a wide variety of uses and applications and play important roles in day-to-day life on Atharen.

Uses

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Arcanacrags

These Fragments have existed on Atharen since the Noradac began to walk the mortal plane. They’re created through a process similar to nuclear fusion between Divinity and the ambient Ether of the mortal plane. A tremendous amount of energy is released on the death of a spirit, such is enough for the severed Divinity to gain mass and harden in the process. Arcanacrags are thus a unique crystalline alloy, which is fundamentally made of Ether and Divinity, but in its whole, is neither. Because of the intensity of the fusion that occurs on a spirit's death, the Adac have never been able to reclaim their divinity from Fragments.

In the beginning, Fragments were almost completely destroyed under the force of a Spirit’s death; left brittle and charred, broken by so much as a strong breeze. So too, was the land around them. The shockwave released on a spirit's death felled trees dozens of miles from the site, and even blackened the craters they made with the heat that was generated in the blast. The fragments left over intrigued many of the Adac, and frightened others. The idea that their divinity could not be reclaimed, even though it regenerated over time, was unsettling. So, a series of tests were run on the primitive Noradac. Many of the first Noradac were killed before their time in observation of these experiments, and the Adac found that they could contain the resulting blast of a Noradac’s death by summoning a shield of inward force, which deprived the reaction of the various elements in the air and saved the environment around them from obliteration.

In addition, the immense pressure and astronomical heat that was applied to the Divinity and Ether in those controlled releases meant that the Fragments produced as a byproduct of the blast were firmer, heavier, and so much richer with Divinity. There was hope to reclaim their wasted Divinity, and so the experiments continued. As more Noradac began to die of natural causes, and many of the Adac expressed no desire in chasing down those Noradac nearing the end of their cycle, it was proposed that all Noradac were made with a failsafe that would automatically contain the explosions that came from their deaths. The Adac unanimously agreed for the sake of both preserving their Divinity, and to stop the constant nuking of the pre-mortal plane.

The experiments continued on those Fragments, looking for ways to separate the conjoined energies, to undo the complicated transformation it had undergone in the destructive nucleus of a fallen Noradac, but it became difficult to track them and collect more samples to experiment with. So, for the sake of convenience, it was proposed that the Adac would make it so that their Spirits would converge on a specific location when they were nearing the end of their cycle. Once there, they would wait either to die or to be reclaimed by their creator. Thus, it was easy to retrieve samples for study and experimentation. Again, the Adac unanimously agreed, but after so long with little in the way of results hopes were running low.

Ages passed with the system they had designed, and though the Adac were no shorter of Divinity than they were before the creation of the Noradac, the gathering locales had become expansive graveyards. Some were large enough to dot an entire field with Fragments. Beholding those gravesites and all the Divinity the Adac had bled over the years was the end to the experiments. It was decided that the Noradac were not the life that the Gods wished to preside over, for they were too costly and finite to maintain. Those that had worked with the Adac for some time had found no shortage of appreciation and admiration for the beings they’d relentlessly experimented upon, and had since unlocked several other facets of the Spirit's existence.

In place of discontinuation, they proposed timelessness; the Noradac wouldn’t decay over time and would live forever. This proposal was accepted for the time being, and when Y’shendra created the first Mortal Races, the Noradac eventually found their place as servants of the Gods. The gravesites that had accumulated over the course of the spirit’s existence were forgotten.

When the Hyr'Norai first discovered Fragments, these crystallized pieces of the Adac, there was a moment of hesitation among most of the gods. Y'shendra urged patience, she wished to see what would become of the encounter, and to her delight, the elves began to use the Fragments to improve their quality of life. This reaction was acceptable, and the

Sunderscraps

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Variants

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