Coraman crystals are the single invention that changed daily life across the Empire more than any other in living memory – introduced the better part of a century ago, and by now so ordinary that most people in Chuza couldn’t tell you how one actually works. What they store is arcane mana itself, drawn from casters both clerical and arcane, banked in a crystalline medium refined from deep-sea coral and released again on demand.
The coral itself is common enough along the Empire’s northern coast, but getting it out of the water is not: it thrives thirty metres down, in the last reach of the photosynthetic zone, dark water shared with considerably larger and less cooperative residents. The Empire holds the coral stocks and earns handsomely from the trade in them. What it does not hold is the refining process – every manufacturing factory capable of turning raw coral into a usable crystal sits inside the New Imperial Lands, and the NIL has never once let that knowledge cross its own borders.
FILE NOTES
Refining starts simply enough: raw coral is innocuous until heated with a handful of closely guarded ingredients, amber chief among them, at which point it turns to Slagma – a quicksilver-like liquid that can then be charged with mana. The NIL exports the finished Slagma rather than the process itself, poured into ingot moulds and shipped out ready for charging elsewhere. Nobody outside the NIL’s own artificers has ever reproduced the step in between.
The running cost is real but rarely questioned. A household light box costs roughly 40gp to install and another 120gp a year in crystals to keep lit – against 36gp for an equivalent torch or 60gp for an oil lantern – and buyers pay it gladly for a light that never smokes, never risks a fire, and barely needs maintaining. The same trade-off shows up everywhere the crystals do: Section 18’s own Kemer-Lexi Cannons, the mortuary’s Coraman lights, the entry wards on Section House doors, even the shigawire recorders used to capture testimony. When a crystal does fail, it doesn’t do so quietly – it blackens, visibly and completely, and the mage who showed Section 18 a dead one recommended checking the stock regularly rather than waiting to find out the hard way.
Not every application has caught on. The so-called tensers disc – a coraman-powered floating skateboard with a handlebar – can outrun a sprinting man and has no brakes to speak of, a combination that has never once been popular with anyone who has actually tried to stop one. Expensive to run and worse to steer, it remains the closest thing the magical world has to a fad nobody asked for.
STATUS: In everyday use across the Empire, and effectively irreplaceable at this point despite nobody outside the NIL fully understanding how the crystals are actually made. Some at Section 18 quietly wonder what else might be tied up in a technology this widespread, this centralised, and this thoroughly out of the Empire’s own hands – a question that has, so far, gone unanswered on the record.