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 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 take form in 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.

Similar to spirits, Mages are also rich with some form of power. Though they are without Divinity, the latent Ether in their bodies can also be crystalized through different means to the Noradac. Being that mages aren't purely made of Ether, like Noradac are made of pure Divinity, they cannot produce Fragments of the same purity or purpose.

Some Fragments are made from the crystallized remains of Noradac, and take form in two different origins 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. These latter varieties are commonly referred to as Sunderscraps because of their application in Sundering. Both have a wide broad spectrum of uses and applications and play important roles in day-to-day life on Atharen, and have changed the course of history alike.

Uses

As mentioned before, Fragments have a broad spectrum of uses on Atharen. Arcanacrags and Sunderscraps cannot be used for the same things as both are composed of different materials, with different origins and varying impurities. Arcanacrags are usually close to indestructible, which plays an important role in their application throughout Atharen, whereas Sunderscraps have a far shorter shelf life with their softer, impure structure, which suits their uses well in Sundering.

The sciences and crafts associated with Fragments were built on the foundation of working with the properties of Arcanacrags and Sunderscraps both, in place of modifying Fragments to suit the needs of the creator. For this reason, most contraptions and tools are built around the Arcanacrag at the center of the design, whereas Sunderscraps are more versatile in that they do not need to maintain any specific shape most of the time.

Arcanacrags

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Sunderscraps

Sunderscraps are used almost solely for the creation of Sundered gear. Their brittle nature makes it easier to transfer the inherent abilities within them through a conduit, and apply them to almost any material or object. The only exception is that the material must be solid; liquids, gasses, and plasmas cannot be Sundered. In addition, the item being Sundered cannot house a soul. In some rare cases, Artificed Golems have been heated to their melting point, and their Sundered properties have been cast off and lost forever.

For that reason, Sunderers typically only use the finest and strongest materials for their Sundered equipment. Damage to the piece, if severe enough, can weaken and even destroy the Sunder. For that reason, it's important to ensure that the material is not only of superior quality but also appropriate for what the Sunderscrap provides.

Sundered gear is imbued with the properties of the Sunderscraps cast upon it. Squall-Born Sunderscraps will usually produce some sort of lightning type of effect or something to do with gales and storms. The effects vary widely based on the Mark the Scrap was Sundered from, the strength of the mage wielding the Mark, and the preparation and intent of the Sunderer.

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 the Fragments left behind.

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 around them at the moment they fell, 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. At last, there was hope to reclaim their wasted Divinity as it took physical form before them, just trapped in chemical bonds with Raw Magic. 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 Noradac 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 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 Gods left the elves, and eventually the humans, to enjoy the crystalized carcasses of their first attempts at life.

Then came The Bleeding, and for the first time in more than four thousand years, a Spirit died. In the Bleeding, many of the Noradac were corrupted. Some even began to prey on the villages of man. Eventually, with enough mages, artillery, and blades, Humans were able to fell a troublesome corrupted spirit. The flash of light that was left in wake of the killing blow was reportedly brighter than the sun and burned the skin of those that stood nearby. Others were rendered blind through shielded eyes from some distance away. When the light cleared, left in place of the Spirit was a smoldering Arcanacrag.

When the rest of the world learned that one could obtain Arcanacrags, these priceless constructs of Ether-laden Divinity, by hunting and killing Spirits, entire factions formed under the goal to hunt as many Noradac as possible. Arcane weaponry was developed with the purpose of slaying Spirits with ease, powered by the same Arcanacrags they hunted for. Overnight, a new industry was formed in the business of hunting Spirits, and overnight it fell. The great Spirit Hunts only spanned thirty years at most in their height, for revealed became the Arch Hollows.

Massive crystalline structures made of pure Arcanacrag were discovered after the bleeding. Though they were wrought with radioactive corruption, various hostile creatures, and dangerous to do so much as breathe on, it was far cheaper to fund a slave's training in navigating the Arch Hollows than it was to hire a hunting party of several dozen men and pay for their expertise. Quickly, the market shifted, and Arcanacrag funding was put toward mining gear and refinement of the corrupted Arcanacrags across the world.

To this day, some seven hundred years later, Arcanacrags are still infinitely valuable, but only because massive entities monopolize the mining of Arcanacrags, and large hunting factions charge unbelievably high for the commission of killing a Spirit, and then astronomically more for the delivery of the Arcanacrag. There is much discussion about what the superior type of Arcanacrag may be (Spirit-Born or Hollow-Born), and both have their merits, but both are incredibly dangerous to harvest and require their own specialized tools and resources to acquire.

Variants

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Sunderscraps

Sunderscraps have existed for the last three hundred years or so. While they are also crystalized Fragments of Ether, they do not contain any Divinity. For that reason, some scholars dismiss them as biological waste and others as a cruel, perturbing practice.

The first Sunderscraps began to surface after the manipulation and alteration of <Arcanacrag> Fragments birthed the tools necessary for converting the latent ether in mages into a form of crystallized ether. The first apparatus was a simple needle that needed only be thrust into the Soul of the mage, directly through the sternum and into the heart, and held there for a minute while the mage crystallized and produced a single Sunderscrap, based on their strongest mark of control.

Three hundred years later, and the apparatus used in Sundering has been innovated to a point where it only takes ten seconds to render the mage immobile, and a Sunderscrap is produced for every mark of control they possess as strong as the victim mage was in that specific Raw Magic.

Being that Sunderscraps are born of mortal meddling and without the purview or intention of the Gods at all, nearly all religious foundations heavily frown upon this practice. Some will even set out to hunt and destroy Sunderscraps with their own elite orders, embarking on massive campaigns to gather and destroy Sundered equipment, Sunderscraps, and Sunderers themselves.

Some nations, like that of Lorien, freely employ Sunderers to provide Sundered arms & armor for their Militaries, while Magocricies like Daravin harshly rebuke all forms of the practice, except those that deal solely in the refinement and manipulation of Arcanacrags.

While Sunderscraps do not come in as many varieties as Arcanacrags, it is undeniable that they're infinitely superior for Enchanting purposes than that of Arcanacrags.

Variants

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