Skip to content

Fractured Remnants

Fractured Remnants are deposits of calcified Macrodesire with various purposes. Their value depends on their size, with the largest and rarest capable of almost unknowable potential. The smaller remnants are much weaker, though still potent, and have been adopted as currency.

Fractured Remnants are a family of different objects. Most common are minerals, ranging from pebble size to larger cobbles. None of the “mineral” subgroup have been found to be larger than a person.1 They colour far differently than natural rocks: even if the surface is rough, most have a clearcoat sheen to them with a dark hue within.

To understand why Fractured Remnants are so elusive—why their capacity to supercharge our ability is unpredictable—one must look at how Macrodesire works. Everyone within Fracture is capable of realising their Desire (the term Macrodesire comes from the Snow Elves, who prior to The Great Split discovered materials that allowed them to perform what we can now do innately) because, it is believed, this world is saturated with the potential for actualisation. We bind to material reality what we wish to alter by parsing this request through the grammar of a system, and it is our internal understanding of that syntax that determines the potency of the action. Fractured Remnants, then, bypass that encoding step. They have a unique relation to Macrodesire at the world-level such that they allow us to extend our will further. At their weakest, this could be a supplement to one’s constitution; the largest develop their own character, specialised in a particular branch of Macrodesire, and must be tended to to fully utilise the power they hold.

It is to these larger Fractured Remnants that we must now turn our discussion. They are legendary in the truest sense of the word: every actor to have taken up one’s power places themselves in the lore of future folk tales. To some, these wielders are gods amongst mortals, only able to be stopped by overwhelming force—or an equal. Particularly during the first few centuries, as tyrants sought to embrace the most power, it was their hubris—their conviction that they were indeed gods—which felled them. The lesson, written in blood, tells us clearly that we must understand the idiosyncrasies of each Fractured Remnant, respect them, and understand their own system to fully embrace their potentially reality-shaping power.

See also

  • The Binding Stone (\(\mathbb{F}_{2}\)) was a crystalline bone that could reconstitute fate. It was transparent, colourless, and about the size of an apple. The Binding Stone is believed to be fully destroyed following the War of Patrons, and its split, non-functional fragments held in an undisclosed location. Its heretical Eyekeepers are disbanded.
  • Fragmented Gravity comes from Weltall, \(\mathbb{F}_{3}\). First discovered at the core of a rogue planet, its especially strong Binding energy manipulates mass, gravity, and pressure as its wielders deem fit.
  • Pakaru (\(\mathbb{F}_{\infty}\)) is an extrenely common, sentient remnant. Both restorative and violent, it is a desperation that should only be embraced in the extremes. Beware red flowers.

Airve Snowblood. Personal notes, 6203

Fractured Remnants. Commoner’s folly, a substitute for money and power for impoverished hands, so the tale went. Nobody made them2, and when you hold them you feel the desire lurking inside, like a glacier breathing within. Even the littlest pennies hold that signature—it’s as recognisable as water. It’s intrinsic to us. Why?

After Sæval ‘disappeared’ nobody really saw them; world got fixed up. You told the grandkids about the person who’d grabbed a burning tree as if it were a twig; you’d warn them about that guy who set up shop in your neighbour’s brain because it was cosy. You’d remind them of hubris and deceit and how powerful these false gods could be, and you’d tell them how to hold their own, if not for a minute. Remnants leave behind legend, and legend is enough to scare a ruler.

Anyone could have picked these up, but it was us who found them again. It was us who felt not a shifting block of ice in our palms but the pulling will of something far larger than we could understand3. For me, I saw the one who sat inside, begging to keep safe a world he couldn’t see. The Stone is on the other side of my desk right now and it would take only a flick of my wrist to bring it—him—back to my mind.4

Despite what Santarri thinks, these Remnants are not the tools of gods.5 We are not their pantheon or their monarchs or whatever. What we hold is, frankly, beyond us. There’s something I’m not seeing…

I need to talk to Pakaru. It might have answers.6

  1. Nothing in our investigations has suggested this is impossible—it’s more a methodological problem. One of the first skills you learn when dealing with remnants is how to verify that you’re dealing with one. It’s a really simple test: you just feel for that pattern within the object. I describe it as the ebb and flow of glaciers. A slow, deliberate motion from within. It’s a problem, then, because so much of the geology around us is steeped in Macrodesire at its base—think of it like background radiation. At the person-scale, it’s minuscule; by the time you target anything larger than, say, a tree, something else is exerting power over the environment. Something else, at least. ↩

  2. But this is not true—not anymore. Look and see it, and maybe you will— ↩

  3. Wait. You will see soon. Wait. What has your god told you..? ↩

  4. Cherish it. I was the first—I have seen it all! That flailing man acted without understanding. We will make you understand. We can make you what you have always treaded towards, Timeless. Go back. See it. Remake it. Rethread. Exist, boundless. ↩

  5. And they are almost, but not quite, correct. Fractured Remnants do not make gods. Just as a blacksmith scrapes off the burr from the axe blade, so too were these remnants cast off from forging our reality. They are his failed ambition, his deepest regrets, his hope for our world and his prison. ↩

  6. And he does. It was before you. Give yourself the 10 seconds and you will know. ↩