Magic, Science & Technology · Introductory

Congruence Cores

What They Are

Congruence in calcified, solid form

Two Sources

Slow natural coalescence, and growth inside a monster

Typical Size

A pearl. A fist is huge; a human head is the stuff of legend

Formation

A pearl-sized core takes roughly a century to form naturally

Use

They power jālaorin, and every magic item is one

Money

The draas is minted against the Clerks' stockpile of them

A congruence core is congruence made solid. Most people on Aropria have seen one, and almost everyone has used something that runs on one.

They are the reason the continent's money means anything, the reason a monster's carcass is worth carrying home, and — in one case — the reason a people exist at all.

What they look like

Cores almost always do something unusual with light. They glow, or seem to drink it, or bend it in a way that is difficult to describe to anyone who has not seen it.

Beyond that, appearance depends entirely on where the core came from.

Where they come from

Coalescence. Cores form slowly in the natural world by a process nobody claims to understand. Shape, colour and form vary enormously. It is commonly held that a pearl-sized core takes about a hundred years to form this way.

Monsters. Cores also grow inside living things, and oddly not inside every dangerous one. A monster carries a core and a beast does not — that is what the two words mean, and it is not a matter of size or temper: a savulak will see off a lone homesteader and carries nothing, while a hummingbird's core is the size of a grain of rice. Beasts are much the more abundant of the two.

A core taken from a creature is always an orb, which is the quickest way to tell the two origins apart, and its size is fairly consistent within a kind of creature.

Which is why they vary so much by creature and so little within one. A hummingbird's core is the size of a short grain of rice and pulses between white and black, and is good for nothing. A sprii's is a pearlescent thing from a grain of rice to a pea, set in the skull above the eyes. A jhund yields a brown pearl veined with red that seems to absorb light. A Mistwalker's runs from palm to fist, resembling bismuth shot through with near-microscopic tunnels. A mature brown beast's is golf-ball sized and marbled from white through taupe to chocolate, and grows with age and hibernation. A Shelev's is fist-sized and glows the same blue-white as the creature.

Size, and what it is worth

Most cores are about the size of a pearl, and those power most of the jālaorin in use across the continent. A core the size of a fist is considered huge. A core the size of a human head is the stuff of legend, and kingdoms have gone to bloody war over possession of one.

That scale explains the economics of monster hunting. A creature that is otherwise worth nothing to anyone is worth a great deal for what is inside it, and much of the Ion'cavar's income comes from exactly that.

What they feel like

To anyone trained in congruence, or with a natural aptitude for it, cores have a presence. Walking into a room holding a great many of them feels like walking into a crowd. Children with an aptitude have been known to react to a core before anyone told them it was there.

Cores and money

The Clerks maintain vaults of cores and mint the draas against them, holding to a rigid core standard. Every draas is imprinted with the signature of the core it is credited against; the imprinting process is a closely held guild secret and its theory is extremely difficult to reproduce.

Torhiv Banks across the continent will exchange draas for cores and back again, though in practice only the very rich are in a position to want to.

Cores in living things

A monster is not the only thing that grows one, and the rest of this section is the exceptions. Fauna & Flora carries the beast-and-monster line itself.

A Synthoid's heart is a core of calcified congruence, and their limbs are connected by almost nothing — the gaps spanned by extremely fine vines that carry congruence unusually well. Synthoid cores are generally pearl-sized, with a rare few far larger. As raw material a core is enormously valuable; once animated inside a Synthoid, it is a person.

A strigoi's core is stranger still, and varies with age and kind. A base strigoi carries what looks like a tumorous growth latched to the heart, a small flesh-shaped stone that smells of iron. Source strigoi have theirs fully integrated.

Even plants can acquire one: a predatory plant that manages to eat something sentient begins to develop a core of its own and grows with strange mutations shaped by what it ate.

What is not a core

The null daemon's blight core looks the part and behaves like nothing of the kind. It does not appear to absorb congruence — no byproduct is observable — and it serves as little more than the creature's heart, lending slightly more durability than a human body would have. Attempting to use one in place of an ordinary core destroys the item outright.

Blood Sands are the other exception: sand carrying microparticles of shattered cores, which seek out sentient beings and are how a strigoi is made.