Heartstone

Heartstone is a rare and valuable gemstone-like substance originating in the First Age, found occasionally by Scavenger Lords excavating the buried ruins of the East. It is crystalline in appearance, blood red run through with streaks the colour of pus.

Some Eastern tribes use Heartstone for its most accessible property: if a Heartstone is stabbed into living flesh, it brings to a halt all natural healing until it is removed. This makes it a useful tool for the hunting of large beasts, who can be kept from healing through a long and arduous hunt. It is also used in forms of torture, where prisoners can be beaten and kept in pain until they are cowed.

The true value of Heartstone, however, is an exotic component for works of artifice, particularly those of a medical nature, concerned with the circulation of blood and Essence within a living body (or, as discovered by at least one Deathlord, artifacts to produce a veneer of life that can be draped over an undead servant).

Few savants or Scavengers know much about the origins of Heartstone, assuming it to be a mineral from some Wyld-inundated mine or the product of complex alchemical treatments no longer understood. In fact, Heartstone was produced during the First Age in a complex process of shaping essence and biology, the brainchild of a Celestial Exalt who sought to apply the principles of geomancy directly to a new medium. If the land could see its essence shaped and directed to form a hearthstone within a manse, could not the essence coursing within the body be shaped and directed to produce

Heartstones begin with a living human. The conditions of life, diet, education, and experience are tightly controlled for this person, they are kept in a near-motionless state and subjected to daily acupuncture treatments to shape their internal essence flows. Slowly over the course of their lives, they begin to develop reddened, painful swollen patches over the location of their hearts as Essence pools and accumulates. These people are then bred with each other to produce offspring who are subject to the same treatment, and over time a child will emerge that has been sufficiently processed and purified to complete the process, a Heartstone coalescing within their heart. The stone is then removed and put to use.

Recreating new Heartstones in the current age is an unlikely prospect: the bloodlines crafted over generations have intermixed with the rest of Creation and been lost, the specifics of acupuncture and culinary alchemy were guarded secrets even in the First Age and far more difficult to unravel now.