Holding I, Technology and Arcanum.
Written Year 145 by Kellen Vor Brightseam, arcanist. Counted last Year 399. The Exemplars have been shown this entry at every seating since it was written.
We have never made a fuse and have never met anyone who could. Every piece of Emberlyr in this fortress was carried here from Remnar.
There is no more coming.
The count
| Counted | In sockets, live | In reserve | Spent |
|---|---|---|---|
| Year 1 | not counted separately | “sufficient” | none |
| Year 145 | 71 | 240 | 19 |
| Year 242 | 71 | 166 | 93 |
| Year 328 | 71 | 104 | 155 |
| Year 399 | 71 | 61 | 198 |
The seated number never changes. The fortress has the sockets it has.
The reserve is how many more times this fortress can fail before it stops. Sixty-one.
At the rate of the last century, forty-three spent in seventy-one years, that is about a hundred years. At the rate of the century before it, nearer eighty-five. The Toren Program burned thirty-one on its own, which is one of the reasons it was closed.
Every seating since Year 145 has been told the reserve is adequate. No seating has said what number would stop being adequate. Four arcanists have asked.
Where it came from
Remnar had a great deal of it. The founding inventory of Year 1 lists Emberlyr among what the twelve lines carried between them, and it is the largest single quantity of anything they brought.
The stone is not ours alone. Three peoples with no connection to each other place it on worlds that never heard of us, always in the same kind of country and never in quantity. What was ours was the abundance and the use. Nobody else cuts Emberlyr into machinery. Most who know it at all know it as a jewel.
Where we have looked
Asked. Every trading partner in Holding VI, repeatedly. Every arrival. Every port we call at. The dwarves of Keiter work more crystal than anyone in this sphere and have been asked eleven times across three centuries: they have never produced a piece, do not know the description, and twice offered magnetite instead, which does not govern anything and was declined.
Not asked. Anywhere we do not go.
The one lead in the file is Kellen Vor Brightseam’s note of Year 162, and it has never been followed:
Eleven traders. None of them knows the stone as machinery. Three know it as a jewel, and they describe it right: red, even, giving off its own dim light, brittle, will not hold a setting. They also say it is not found where a mine would be. Two used a phrase I will write down as where the dark is thicker than the distance explains. One laughed and said it comes up where nobody sensible goes.
So the stone is not gone. It is somewhere, on some ground, coming up a little at a time and going to people who make crowns.
I have asked four times for a vessel and a season to find out where. I have been refused four times because the reserve is adequate. Enter the refusal with a number attached, so the arcanist who comes after me can see at what point the answer changes.
No number was entered. The voyage has never been authorised.
Working the sockets
Check the glow, not the stone. Dead Emberlyr becomes black dust in the shape of the stone. A socket can look full and be dead. No red light means no fuse.
Keep the dust. A spent fuse holds the pattern of the housing it died in, well enough to work with. Four keepers noticed this across four centuries and none of them found a use for it, so we sweep the sockets and keep the dust in sealed jars in the arcanum stores instead of throwing it out. The jars are still there.
On substitutions, see How Flow Is Governed. Short version: it runs, it does not govern, expect wild magic, replace it when you can.