Olphin Stones
| Type | Enchanted stones |
|---|---|
| Owner | Seely and Reagan Hideaway |
| Origin | Found at Treenode when the Olphins were taken to Morgaedion |
| Properties | One controls the Olphin race, the other breaks the control |
| First appearance | Sacred: Eslura's Calling |
The Olphin Stones are two translucent grey stones that work against each other like an on and off switch. One carries a spell that empties an Olphin of will and makes them obedient; the other breaks that spell. Pemadee calls them the reactor and the deterrent, and no other name for them is recorded.[1] Between them they are the evidence that the Olphins never chose to turn on Eslura.[2]
The reactor stone
The reactor is translucent grey and large enough to fill Barnaby Britto's palm, its surface crossed by strange markings.[2] It sat for years in a single glass display case on a side wall of Pemadee's office at Tide Tale Alley Books, walled in by old tomes.[3]
Rubbed in a circular motion the stone begins to glow. Seely demonstrated it on Barnaby in his own house outside Treenode: at the light Barnaby dropped to the floor, teeth gritted, shaking all over as though he were being electrocuted, though Seely maintained that he felt no pain. When Seely told him to stand, he stood, blank and silent, eyes empty of everything that made him himself, waiting on the next order. Told to fetch a candy, he crossed the room like a machine and fetched one. Rubbing circles the opposite way put the light out. Barnaby snapped backward, cracked his head on a pile of books, and remembered nothing of any of it.[2]
The deterrent stone
The deterrent is also translucent grey, about the size of a golf ball.[4] It resists mind control rather than imposing it, which is the reverse of what the reactor does.[5] Tabitha Glowdish stole it from Seely and kept it in a large blue and gold painted box that she would let nobody else touch.[1][6]
History
Pemadee found both stones at Treenode when the Olphins were taken from the town and shipped to Morgaedion for imprisonment, on the same trip that he found the infant Barnaby. He took one and gave the other to Seely, and the two kept them deliberately apart while they researched, so that if either were caught the other would still hold a stone.[1] The research cost Seely his position among the Knowers and got him exiled from Galecrest.[2]
Tab's theft left Seely without his half. Pemadee pressed his stone and Seely's letter into Barnaby's hands in an alley in Ovallia and sent him to find the Knower, calling it their only hope of the Olphins ever being freed.[1] After the demonstration Seely laid out his conclusion: Obellius Kalaar had struck a bargain with the god Nelazgus, as others of Veskadoth had before him, and taken from it the power to control the Olphin race. The Olphins were innocent.[2] Seely still holds the reactor stone.[5]
The deterrent went the long way round. Fleeing a drovig across the Kella Desert, Tab cut her painted box loose to lighten a labouring pergonzia and watched the worm swallow it whole.[6] She went back for it with Reagan Hideaway and Aero Ellisvat, found the drovig asleep in a cavern with a dozen babies curled against her, and made her sick with red stones from the Heart of the Kella rather than kill her. Tab spent half an hour wading through what the worm brought up and came out of it steaming, stinking and holding the stone.[7]
Tab stayed behind in Varaar to get Fawn and the other women out of the city, and handed the stone to Reagan on her way out of the door with the instruction that Bea would need it if she ever hoped to hold off Obellius.[4] Erwin tried to take it from her inside Elmryn's Castle in Zybersia, threatening first her eyes and then Aero, and she burned him off the walkway instead.[8] Reagan carries it still. It has not reached Bea.