Holding I, Technology and Arcanum.
Written Year 39, when the Terminal System was finished. Revised Year 145 by Kellen Vor Brightseam, arcanist.
Power is not our problem. We have plenty, stored in crystal, drawn from the core, and running in the currents outside. Our problem is holding it back.
Let magic move through a system unchecked and it will pull more than the system can give. It does this without warning and it does it fast.
The fuse
So every conduit here runs through a fuse of Emberlyr, the red stone. The fuse is cut symmetrical, which means you cannot seat it wrong: any way round fits the socket.
Emberlyr gives no power. It conducts and it holds the rate down to what the conduit was built for. That is all it does. A fuse in a conduit carrying no load is idle, not empty, and it is not storing anything you could use.
When something demands too much, the fuse dies first. It breaks the circuit and everything past it survives. That is the fuse working, not failing.
So when you find a dead fuse: replace it, then find out what pulled the load. In that order. If you skip the second step you will kill the new one too.
Reading a dead fuse
A dead fuse does not crack, cloud, or darken. It falls to fine black dust that holds the shape of the stone until something touches it.
This means a socket can look full and have been dead for a century.
Check the glow, not the stone. Live Emberlyr shines red. No red light, no fuse, whatever you can see sitting in the socket.
Putting something else in the socket
You can seat a power source where a fuse belongs. It will carry the load and the system will run.
It will not govern the load. Nothing in that arrangement is holding the rate down, and nothing is built to die first any more. Expect wild magic when you seat it and again at intervals afterward, and expect the next thing to fail to be the conduit rather than the fuse.
Use it to get a system running. Replace it with a real fuse when you can.
Supply
We cannot make Emberlyr and we have never found anyone who can. What is aboard is what we carried here, it is counted, and it is going down. The count and the search for more are in On the Fuse Stock. Read that before you start pulling fuses.