The twelve blue crystals of the ancients appear again and again in pre-Binding fragments; always described as “all-powerful,” never accompanied by a single concrete example of their use. Were they engines of transmutation? Anchors for the gods? Devices to reshape geography, species, even time itself? The sole surviving description of the Binding speaks of the world “breaking by twelfths” in the dual-sided tongue of that age. A phrase that can just as readily be read as “twelve broke the world.” If so, the crystals may not merely have survived the Binding, but caused it. Whatever truly happened, the event hurled civilization back by many thousands of years, and we still sift through the rubble a hundred millennia later.
— from the research notes of Zyr’Magi Tes’Lothen, “Magi the Blade”, high-aelv scholar, mage, and swordsman
