Crystal of Flowering Knowledge
History
A Crystal of Flowering Knowledge is a form of information storage dating from the First Age, though its roots lie in the Prehistoric Era. The Crystals emerged out of the crystal artifice of the Dragon Kings, whose crystal codices served as paper to humans, displaying their texts. As artifice expanded in the First Age, this base provided both component and inspiration for several branches of artifice, in one direction leading to the Translation Crystals and in another to the Crystals of Flowering Knowledge.
The Crystals themselves were designed to create a more convenient way of storing and transferring information. Rather than creating a crystal text as if it were a whole book, Exalted artificers separated the two into Pool of Revelation readers and similar systems which could display information and Crystals of Flowering Knowledge which stored it... a library using such crystalline artifice could fit a dozen crystals and a reader in the same space as would fit only two or three traditional tomes or crystal codices. Crystals were also more durable than scrolls for transporting information across Creation, and steps could be taken to pair specific sets of the crystals with specific readers, in order to protect their contents from prying eyes.
The height of development for the Crystals came with the development of thinking automatons in the Golden Age, Crystals of Flowering Knowledge were paired with Cogence Nodes of Azure Ice as parts of the latticed cores of Perfected Calculation Arrays. However, from this zenith their use began to fade, with development of I AM and other complex networks removing the need to physically store and move information using such crystals. At the same time, the Dreamscape Tutor Gem brought the divergent branch of the Translation Crystal back to join that of data storage once more in a more effective package than the crystal codex.
Description
A Crystal of Flowering Knowledge is a long, narrow crystal, semi-transparent, slightly longer than a human hand. Empty, they are still and cool to the touch, but when knowledge is stored within they begin to warm, pulsing softly almost as a heartbeat… the more stored within, the warmer and stronger they pulse. Additionally, though they begin cloudy white, in the present day some have observed that those which have sat for many centuries in buried archives seem to take on colours which speak to their contents... military manuals tint crimson, encrypted missives emerald, love stories blue, tour guides saffron…
The specific device goes by several names. The name Crystal of Flowering Knowledge remains in use today amongst Scavenger Lords, but many engineers both in the First Age and Age of Sorrows find it ungainly. The Kinetropic School of artifice tends to term the devices ‘knowledge crystals’, while its parent the Devonian School preferred ‘data crystal’.
While the systems which can make use of these crystals vary significantly, the structures into which they are placed share much in common, appearing vegetal as one would expect for a technology based on that of the Dragon Kings, though often a magical material such as Moonsilver or green Jade was employed by Golden Age artificers. The name of the Crystals speaks to this, rather than their individual appearance, which it would be difficult to call evocative of a flower: in most readers, the Crystal is attached to a ‘stem’ which shifts much as a socket might to a Hearthstone, wrapping about the crystal so it emerges as if it were a budding flower. In certain library archives gracing Twilight Caste workshops, branches of Magical Materials would be grown between Crystals, coming together to connect them all to a single central Pool of Revelation , the whole almost tree-like in appearance, while in a Calculation Array, threads of Magical Materials & Azure Ice would weave between Crystals and Cogence Nodes in a spiderweb of thought and essence.
Though the crystals are resistant to damage, they are not perfect in recollection. In the First Age, savants noted that stress upon the systems to which they were connected could introduce errors or gaps into information, and in the present age it seems that time unused causes some data to fade or fragment, particularly when a crystal stored larger or more complex texts. While this was considered the equivalent of water damage to the ink and paper of a book, some mused it seemed far more similar to the uncertainties seen in living memory.
Construction & Uses
Crystals of Flowering Knowledge saw use not only in direct storage but as components in construction of more significant magitech artifacts and systems which deal with data storage and recall (such as automatons or archives) . They are constructed and serve as 1-dot Artifacts for this purpose.
In the present day, Scavenger Lords searching ancient ruins will sometimes come upon these Crystals, either on their own or as part of now-failed archive trees or broken automaton lattices. As the crystals possess physical features to indicate the extent and type of their content, it is easy to determine when one has made a valuable find… however, the number of readers capable of using the crystals is small indeed, and so for all but the brightest, hottest-pulsing crystals it is a buyer’s market.
