RESTRICTED. Elder credentials required. Held to the Exemplars by standing order.
Holding II, Stone of Endurance.
Authorised Year 178 by Doru Marrenth Stonefast. Ended Year 242 by Mirren Stellara Farwatch. Sealed the same year, and the approach struck from the plans by the same order.
A research programme of the Exemplars. It ran sixty-four years. The laboratory is still inside this fortress, sealed, and its approach is the one struck entry in the sealed list.
The name is the Given Name meaning strength, off the register in Holding IV. It is not named after anyone. The authorisation says so outright: we are not naming it after anybody, and no one is to be told it is named after them.
What it was for
To field one fighter that could meet Solanari Dominion forces on terms we could not otherwise meet.
We have no army. We cannot raise one and could not supply one if we did. The Exemplars’ reasoning, kept with the authorisation, was that a people too few to field a force might instead field one thing a force cannot stop, and that what we needed was not numbers but sufficiency.
What it tried
Take the body of a cloud giant, chosen for mass and for how well it holds together. Bring it back to motion by crystalline means. Strengthen it well past what it could do alive. Direct it from a distance, using the same principles that run this fortress.
We never got a giant. Buying one was always going to be the single largest cost, and the Exemplars authorised that as a last step, conditional on the method working first. It never did, so we never tried to buy one.
So the work went on with smaller subjects throughout.
Animation worked. Reliably, on every subject.
Direction at distance worked. Within tolerance, at every range tested.
Strengthening never worked. Not at any scale. Not on any subject. Ever.
Why it was closed
Three grounds, in the order the Exemplars gave them.
First, the strengthening had not moved in a long time, and the failure looked like principle rather than technique. Subjects held animation. They took direction. They would not hold strengthening. Every approach gave the same result, which the investigators described as the body refusing to hold what was put into it. Nothing we tried changed it. The closing assessments say plainly that the Program was missing something it had not identified and did not know where to look for.
Second, it cost too much for what it returned. It was eating crystal, conduit stock, and the time of our best arcanists faster than the Exemplars could justify, and it had not yet reached the step that would cost most. Buying a giant’s corpse to test a method that did not work was described in the termination record as throwing good after bad.
Third, and this decided it, we had barely seen the Dominion in years. The threat it was authorised against had not turned up.
Two Exemplars objected to that third ground and were overruled. Their objection is filed with the order and printed in full in the register.
What is behind the door
The laboratory was sealed, not cleared. The order leaves the apparatus, the remaining subjects, and the working record where they stand, on the reasoning that moving that material through the fortress was more dangerous than leaving it.
The route was struck from the plans by the same order and is held by Exemplars in person. What that costs us is set out in The Sealed Sections.
The Program burned thirty-one Emberlyr fuses in sixty-four years. That is the largest single draw on the stock in our history and it is counted in The Fuse Stock. The second ground for closing turns on it.
The full research record was never copied into the Archive. Only summaries are here. The working record and the apparatus are still in the laboratory, along with whatever the closing arcanists left where it stood.