Endless Blue - Week 36.4 - The Spurs: Gemstone Bones of the Ocean Floor

Geography

Spurs: Gemstone Bones of the Ocean Floor

Perhaps one of the most anomalistic occurrences in the oceans, there stand the rare crystalline outcroppings known to only the most invested of historical sages as the Spurs. The lack of knowledge about these icons among the learned is nearly absolute, let alone any rumor that a laymer may have half-heard.  Most common pisceans will look slack-jawed at anyone asking about these enigmas, with the more facetiously pernicious spilling  great fonts of mercurial information for the price of one more cuprei lucrum.

Unknown to most, many of the civilized bodies of waterin the Periphery have at least one Spur inside their boundaries, though their locations are perhaps the most highly guarded secret the respective government keep.  Only in the Mer Currents has there never been found one of these monolithic growths.  Neither the Orcans nor the Chelon publicly admit to the Spurs existence but most assuredly have located at least one, and any discourse with the Lumulus results in an even more tenuous understanding of the phenomena that when you started.  Xantellaettes that a privy to the obscure lore of Spurs have noticed that never do ley lines and spur location coincide.  Whatever inference can be gleaned from this tiny morsel of observation is lost by the extreme jealousy that keeps the Spurs' existence from spreading.

Among the more primitive territories of the Hinterseas is another matter.  The Yaun-Teel Bights and Sahaguin Lagoons seem to share the same lack of Spurs as the Mer Currents, but the Kouton Bay and to a lesser extent the Gulf of Locanth have several.  The Kouton have them hidden away behind magic and mundane camoflague, even from each other.  The Locanths, in comparison, give them a wide berth, treating them with the same respect you would give to a venemous sea snake.  Even the migratory herds that the Locanth follow on their nomadic trek across their homesea avoid these places like the plague.  Locanth shaman will speak of the structures if approached correctly, but no consistent answer will ever be collected.

Beyond the familiar waters of the Hinterseas shows the prolific arrangement of these crystal plinths.  The farther west traveled, the greater the likelihood of encountering a Spur, but with so few explorers bitten with wanderlust their commonality has never been noted.  This is changing now, however, as the crowded nations of the Core push outward in the need for more breathing space.  Perhaps a Chelon xanthellaette might partner with a Kouton cartographer and one day map out the peculiar arrangement of these gemstone bones that stick out from the still sands like ribs of a long dead leviathan?

Another piece of the puzzle ruminates in the restless minds of the Godless.  Going against convention and risking deadly religious persecution, lone inquisitive minds of the loosely-knit movement have braved to peek above the waves and gaze into the Vastness above.  One of the multitude of incomprehensible sights that have been observed is an occasional refraction in the sky, a tiny sliver of expanse that seems to warp light like how an algae bloom spreads through the waters.  The Godless have taken to naming these prisms as "Shards", as they seem to scatter the light in the same manner that a cleaved facet from a jewel does.  Never has one of these airborne Shards been examined up close, but if the knowledge of the Spurs was ever to make its way into public domain, perhaps a link might form?

The current theorem of the origin of the glassy columns conjectures they are remnant artifacts of the ancient civilization known as the Icht.  Very little written material has survived from that time, but the Icht Dominion was credited with advances in technology far ahead of any other sentient race.  It is said their territory spanned most of what is now the Known World, and surely if they had not created the enigmatic pylons the the knew the most about them.

Spurs are difficult to detect until you are practically on top of them.  Perfectly transparent, they are nearly impossible to spy normally without something dark on the other side of them, its reflection refracted in the Spur.  Jutting out of the silt-lined ocean beds, they are always aligned perfectly straight, absolutely vertical, perpendicular to the horizon, as if bisecting the distance into halves.  Even in areas of geological turmoil, where the ground has shifted and bedrock lolls at inconvenient angles, these obelisks maintain their upright alignment pointing upward at the Vastness, almost accusingly.

Comprised of some unfamiliar, unidentifiable mineral, they have proven to be harder than diamond, and radiating an extreme, ephemeral cold that does not affecting the waters around them.  Slightly pyramid-shaped and conical, they stand taller than an Orcan, the six sides of these Spurs seem to just barely register to the naked eye as sloping upwards. so smooth to the touch they are nearly frictionless.

These slabs of simply faceted mineral are made of a clear, volcanic obsidian that seems to resist corrosion. Despite this, most are hidden by the slow encroachment of barnacles and coral collecting around them when they fail to attach to the clear, textureless surface.  If the accumulated detritus where stripped away, the surface would be seamless and featureless other than a single teardrop shaped indentation about the size of a thumb, approximately a foot below the top tip.

There have been many attempts at collecting the miracle crystal of spurs, but successful harvesting of the clear material has so far failed.  This does not prevent hucksters from trying to con the gullible from their lucrum with fanciful tales of how they came upon their rare stashes of spur-stuff that no one has heard of before now.  Most of these incredible new finds are the most common of quartz, cut haphazardly and ground together in an attempt to reproduce the convincing facade of age and naturalness.

"There are things you shouldn't know,
Things you aren't meant to know,
and then there are things others chose for you not to know.
I suspect these things are all three..."
-- a huckster's lure for the gullible, the vain, and the inquisitive.