Speculation on Aetheric Vitae, liminal realms, and how a process for safely mining it might play into the fall of the Karaz Ankor's Golden Age.
First, some observations:
- Thungni discovered the Glittering Realm, Ankor Bryn; Gazul's sword cut it away from the Aether, making it "In and of the material."
- Thorek called AV "The undifferentiated substance of the Polar Realm." Being someone who got where he is via archaeology into old dwarf runelore this indicates the Dawi of old may have known about to to a good degree.
- Kragg's repulsion of magic of is sufficient to interact with it, as we see with his displeasure making Mathilde worried he would push it against its container hard enough to destroy it.
- The Rainbow falls are a font of magic far south of the Chaos Wastes, and quite close to Laurellorn with it's own grand and noteworthy Liminal Realm. Notably, the Smith of Vaul who work in that space, are required to use techniques that sound suspiciously like safety and handling instructions for Aetheric Vitae.
- Teclis was able to carve out the Grey College's realm and make orbs of sorcery, both properties now associated with the Vitae. Notably, he was able to do so without a major trip back for innumerable tankards of a suspicious and deeply volatile silver liquid.
The latter two points make me suspect that liminal realms are quite important to the normal extraction of Vitae.
So, from those observations, I have a hypothesis as to what the process might have been.
1: Compression of Aetheric Vitae opens doors to new liminal realms,
2: At some point in the process these mini-realms are integrated into the Glittering Realm.
3: More Vitae, by some means, is extracted from the Glittering Realm while the connection remains active.
4: Gazul's techniques burn that mini-realm into reality to seal the breach into the Aether and shore up the defenses.
Rinse and repeat, indefinitely, and as long as you have a stockpile of Aetheric Vitae, it nets you have a technique for reliably, and quite literally,
mining more Vitae from the fabric of reality... basically indefinitely.
It could also would be why the Ankor Bryn
glittered: Dozens if not hundreds of new realities under supervision of the Runelords of old and their works popping into existence in the darkness, disgorging the vitae anew, scoured by flame into material space, and on and on, indefinitely.
As long as you have spare stockpiles of Aetheric Vitae.
A unwise frog's Continent Shattering Earthquake might be sufficient to detonate all or most of the seed Vitae, especially if further tumults meant any surviving stores needed to be consumed in the heat of the moment.
This would, naturally, degrade both the infrastructure of the Karaz Ankor, and also Runelore itself: Even if Runesmiths were deemed worthy to learn the techniques of using it, there would be nothing left to train them with.
