Speaking of AV, I wonder if it could have any interesting interaction with the Shyish-kebobs we found (and then turned in) way way back at the very start?
Anybody feel like using a Social Action to check if the Amethyst College has reverse-engineered the Enchantments on them? Because that Enchantment was all about sucking in and capturing the Winds of magic... and somehow twisting it on itself and into a lattice. Almost like a proto-powerstone or something. Mathilde was so young back when she was researching that stuff she probably hadn't known how Powerstones were made (by compressing a thread of magic) or the possible application or implication of that.
In the peaceful quiet of your excavated spare room, illuminated by a softly glowing ball of Ulgu, you peer closely at the sword. The Shyish is unmistakable, densely twisted in on itself in a spiralling lattice, and as far as you can tell untainted by Dhar. You frown and look closer, not sure what it is you're seeing.
Magic, you know, is fundamentally about taking the unreality of the Winds and forcing them into reality, softening the fundamentals of what is and twisting them according to the will of the caster and the nature of the Wind in question. If you push Aqshy into reality, fire can appear from nothing, because the Aqshy temporarily and locally changes reality so that fire can come from nowhere. But where spellcasting does so for mere seconds, enchanting does so indefinitely. In reality fire needs fuel, but a magically burning sword does not, because the sword is no longer entirely real and therefore no longer beholden to that aspect of reality.
But just as the sword becomes partly unreal, the Winds become partly real. An enchanter isn't just bringing the Winds into reality, they're changing the nature of the Winds themselves.
(Also, given our newfound discoveries about the Winds of Magic somehow enforcing reality if sent into the Aethyr... who knows what's up with some of the above quote. Where it talks about Aqshy manifesting and resulting in fire. Maybe the reason Aqshy creates fire is because Aqshy is drawn from The Elemental Plane Of Fire Back On The Old Ones' Home Planet or something, which is the reason why Aqshy acts Aqshy-like even if you send it into the Aethyr rather than into reality.)
(Which is to say, maybe an enchanter isn't entirely changingthe nature of the Winds. Maybe they're just stabilizing them in some way. Or something.)
But that isn't what you're seeing here. The Winds are densely-packed but unchanged in their fundamental nature - but that can't be right, because the fundamental nature of Shyish isn't being stacked up in a sword like apples in a barrel. So you look for the barrel itself, peering closer and closer to try to make out what would be a tiny amount of magical framework around the overpowering glow of the trapped Shyish. It's like trying to see a candle in front of a bonfire, and your vision blurs as your eyes strain to make it out, and you wince at the sudden coldness as your nose touches the iron of the blade but you think you just caught a glimpse of it, right at the edge of the-
"Hmf. Found in Stirland, I take it? So Asoborn construction... oh, I know what this is. Bloody primitives. There was a belief back then that the Winds of Magic were the souls of the dead, so some twit wizards put enchantments on the weapons to absorb ambient winds thinking that would mean it would eat the souls of those killed with it. Nasty stuff, except wrong in literally every way." He closes the case with a click. "So instead you end up with the swords sucking in all sorts of magic and it ends up mixing and curdling and next thing you know it's Dhar. At that point the best thing to do is find a nice volcano to drop it into. You've got the exception to the rule, though - looks like it's been soaking up nothing but Shyish, so it hasn't been tainted." He shrugs. "Not that it's any good. The enchantment itself is lost and could be interesting to work with, but you can't reverse-engineer the enchantment without grounding the Shyish, and unless you do it right the first time, that takes the blade and thus the enchantment with it and you're left with nothing."
Also also, the Shyish was "densely twisted in on itself in a spiralling lattice." I wonder if that's of interesting utility here? I mean, a Wind being densely twisted in on itself. Without outright being turned into a Powerstone.
That Enchantment on the swords
sucks in the Winds and twists them into a stable lattice. Reginald points out that it usually results in Dhar because it sucks in a bunch of different Winds and they clump together, but
these swords just so happened to
only be exposed to Shyish and so they
only sucked up Shyish.
Aside from wondering if this might be a proto-Powerstone technique -- in
Enchantment form at that -- and so could be useful to make Powerstones faster or more efficiently or whatnot... I wonder if it could be used for other things? That is, maybe it could turn Powerstones into Orbs of Sorcery, by feeding more of the Wind to the Powerstone.
Or maybe it could do something with Aethyric Vitae. If you were to get an empty sword and dip it into AV, would it result in something interesting? (Or would it just cause AV to destabilize into Winds. Which would be sad.)
As Reginald said, the old wizards thought the Winds of Magic were the souls of the dead. Maybe they actually had observed undifferentiated aether-stuff. Or maybe they had observed the Winds transforming. Or had observed spirits bleeding, or liminal realms, or people's souls. Or maybe some godly miracles or energies. (Or maybe this stuff is Qhaysh.) And tried to do something with what they saw; trying to take the Winds of Magic, and squish them back together into aether-stuff again, via an Enchantment. But all they managed to get was Dhar, because if you crudely force the Winds together, you don't get a rainbow or pure light, you get a muddy brown instead.
Still though. Could this be one of the ways you can create semi-sapient weapons? I mean, sticking AV into weapons somehow. Felix's sword had a hatred for Dragons and he thought it had some sort of... awareness or intelligence or
something to it. He could have been totally wrong of course. But still.
How would people feel about a Social Action of "Visit the Amethyst College and check on the Shyish-kebobs and see if anybody managed to reverse-engineer them"?
What if the Shyish-kebob Enchantment might be very interesting for Orb of Sorcery creating (i.e. if you make the Enchantment and then use it to add more of the Wind to a Powerstone) or if you stuck AV rather than a Wind into the Enchantment. Or whatever other stuff.
Heck, even if it doesn't do anything for Orbs of Sorcery or AV, maybe it could still be interesting to see if it'd be useful for Ulgu enchantments or magic tricks. An Enchantment that piled up Ulgu, maybe it could be useful for something. Maybe an Ulgu grenade. Maybe a spell aid for Ulgu spellcasting. Maybe something else.
... Alternatively, actually, come to think of it...
... If this Enchantment captures and compresses the the Winds of Magic... could it be used like a battery to capture Winds of Magic when AV transforms?
i.e. Take AV. Induce transformation; the Winds go flying off in all the various directions.
Objects enchanted with the Kebob-enchantment are placed in a compass point around the AV. The objects capture the Winds of Magic that came from the AV.
Boom, you have mini batteries of Winds of Magic or something.
