Kallite
Kallite is the luminous mineral threaded through Drevari bodies in veins that run from their cores to the surface of their skin. It is present in Drevari ruins and in the deep strata of the Karath Range. Small quantities have been found in other mountain ranges, always at depths that require significant excavation. The Aldenmere Empire has been mining it for three hundred years.
Truth Resonance
Its defining property is resonance. Kallite responds to truth — not to sound, not to any sound, but specifically to spoken truth. When a truth of ordinary significance is spoken near a kallite vein, the mineral brightens by a small but measurable amount. When a truth of historical significance is spoken — something that concerns what has happened in the world’s deep past — the brightening is significant and unmistakable. When a Drevari speaks a vel-orn — a founding truth, something that was true before time had the capacity to argue — the kallite blazes.
What Kallite Does Not Do
Lies do not darken it. Lies are not its concern. It responds specifically to truth because truth, in the physics of this world, is not an opinion. It is an event: the moment when memory and reality align. Kallite witnesses that alignment. It cannot be faked and it cannot be stolen — removed from a Drevari body, kallite no longer resonates. It retains the visual appearance of the mineral but loses the quality that makes it significant. The Aldenmere Empire’s treasury is full of beautiful stone that no longer does anything.
Living Kallite
The kallite in Drevari bodies is different from the kallite in their ruins. The mineral in a living Drevari is warmer, responds faster, and carries a faint pulse. It is, in some sense that Vorrath declines to fully explain, part of their circulatory system. When Vorrath holds the Heartstone for the first time in three thousand years, the kallite throughout his body blazes and then dims to its deepest glow. The event takes less than a minute. It lasts, in the memory of everyone present, considerably longer.