Thursday 14 March 2019

Gold doesn't weigh anything

Gold doesn't weigh anything. Well, it does: when you hold a coin in your hand, it feels heavy. But still, you can hoist a backpack bursting at the seams, without straining your muscles or tearing the fabric.

Could it be that gold wants to be taken?

There is power in gold. Realness. Out of all materials, it maintains the most realness between timelines. You can travel the eons in a ship plated of gold. Iron can't be mined and quarried and brought back from a next door dimension, but gold can. The magnetic fields of iron make it especially 'sticky' to reality, which is why faeries shun it. But something about the heaviness of gold makes it light. Like an eyelid drooping with too much sleep, like a koi in a still dark pond, it can move between realities.

by Yoann Lossel


Lead is like this too, but no one covets the sullen stubbornness of lead. In its unimaginative state, it cannot fathom other realities, and so it persists through all of them, a sulky stain.

This is why both gold and lead are proof against scrying, and other magics that peer across dimensions.

Druids hate gold: it's dirty, polluted, you don't know where it's been. They wear bands of silver; pure and singing songs of unabashed Realness, and copper, which calls out to the heavens and thrums with the thunderbolts. Gold, although immutable, picks up imprints of it's owners, like a fingerprint in the soft metal. Hatred. Passion. Desire.

It sings to the dragons of desire. They hear it from eons away, from across the stars. They hone in on it, though they don't always know where it is. A wanderer chasing the echoes of singing through a cave. Dragons, who have no words for 'past' or 'future,' but only 'probability.' An event in the past that is almost unknown is assigned as much contingency and doubt as a speculative event in the future. Some parts of the future are very certain. But gold is Known, it is here. The Draconic word for 100% probability is the same as the word for gold.

by Justin Gerard


And gold in a dragon's clutches gains some of their power. It gains a charge, like the build up of static electricity, from every hand it passes through, every life it touches with it's burning brand of the Real. But in a dragon's smoldering hoard it gains the most of all. And when it passes to a mortal, after theft or murder, that smoldering passes too. Gold soaked in bloodshed begets more bloodshed still.

1 comment:

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