Magestone Construction

The courtyard of the Wizard's Association building was at one point a decorative square, with artfully trimmed hedges and rosebushes, but the space was determined to be more useful as a proving grounds for spellcraft, and was now merely a pit of sand, excavated ten feet below ground level. A line of three large blocks of uniform grey rock rested on the sand, the skyrodem having cured overnight, and the small crowd of wizards around the pit's ring were watching expectantly as Mellitus walked to the center block.
The guildmaster rested his left hand against the block, then called to the group. "Open your mind's eye and examine this center block. What do you see?"
A younger wizard shouted back. "A jumble. Chaos. Lines in a mishmash."
"Correct, Oudis. Attempt to break the block." The guildmaster stepped away as the wizard began to tap into the leylines. Her brow furrowed, and with a sharp *crack*, the block's face spiderwebbed and crumbled, with bits and pieces of skyrodem falling to the sandy floor.
The guildmaster moved to the next block and pointed at another wizard. "Rockwell. What do you see in this block?"
The taller man replied immediately. "Perfect alignment in depth. No jumbles. Every strength line pointed tangent to the surface, aligned towards us."
Mellitus nodded. "Magestone, aligned by myself. Shear it." As he stepped away, the taller man pointed a finger, and with another sharp *crack*, the next block broke, but perfectly, as though cut by a knife. The sheared upper third of the block slid off the rest and landed with a thud against the sandy pit. The edges were razor sharp, and the surface of the exposed block shimmered in the morning sun.
The grandmaster continued. "Conversion to magestone does not make skyrodem impervious. It merely places the structural weakness of the material in a direction of our choosing. It so happens that a weakness in the vertical is far more useful than in the horizontal plane." He walked to the last block. "This magestone is aligned in the vertical axis. I want all of you to attempt to break this block laterally, make a direct horizontal cut through the vertical alignment. All of you, at the same time."
As he stepped away from the stone, he felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end, as the fifteen or so wizards all began to channel magepower at once. A number of low pitched *thumps* sounded out from the third stone, and some surface cracks appeared in its face, until suddenly a louder *thump* sounded, and the whole stone rotated up and flipped over onto its side.
"Too strong, Alais!" The grandmaster waved his hand at the young woman with a sheepish expression. "Nevertheless, the example holds. Attempting to break a magestone block against its axis is a fool's errand. This behavior is analogous to that of old and dry wood, but many orders of magnitude stronger. The Constructors want a new development east of the Grand Canal to be raised with magestone, as a new commercial district. All of you will be assisting on this project, and for that purpose, you will each be learning how to pattern and align skyrodem into magestone today."

Utility

The discovery of magic in 715 set off a rush of research towards the applications of magic for commercial and industrial use, across nearly all fields of engineering and development. Skyrodem-derived magestone was discovered to have useful properties in research, and it was proved outside the Etoile Capital City to an astonishing degree, as a magestone test building was simply built floor by floor, each layer simply set above the prior layer as soon as that layer cured, to twenty stories in height without major evidence of stress or fracture.
Magestone is not yet in wide use, with the Arbiter of Progress from the Progress Office awaiting the results of several long-term trials before approving magestone construction as an accepted building method in the Principality of Etoile. However, the strength of magestone construction promises to reshape the idea of a modern city, as instead of a simple grid of four-story buildings, massive towers can be built across multiple city blocks, packing thousands more people into new vertical growth settlements.

Manufacturing

Skyrodem's manufacture, while simple on paper, requires a robust logistic chain to transport large amounts of filler granite and limestone to the manufactory, typically delivered by river barge. Powered crushers and mixers refine the output skyrodem, requiring a modern manufactory process to produce skyrodem by the ton. The conversion of skyrodem to magestone requires wizards that are skilled both in fine detailed magecraft and in the broad strokes of architecture and materials engineering, in order to usefully assist in building construction. A wizard must be present on the site of construction in order to pattern the skyrodem once set, magically aligning the material to impart strength.

Social Impact

The construction of the Etoile Capital City was a crowning achievement of Progress, an entire modern city master-planned after The War of Unification with every amenity and feature available at the time, with space for growth and new technologies and distribution systems. One major limitation during construction of the city, however, was height. While enormous castles could be raised using archaic quarried stoneworking methods, the expense required to build an entire city in this way was cost prohibitive, and it was generally unsuited to the relatively soft soil of the Capital's isthmus floodplain. Timber construction is generally limited to roughly three stories in height before the building begins to destabilize. Ironwork construction can be built to height, but has similar limitations to quarried stonework in cost. Experiments with skyrodem yielded structures that could be built taller, but the buildings lacked durability, with cracks spiderwebbing across the structure and eventually causing the structure to collapse. As a result, the buildings of the Capital City were built out of old fashioned stone and mortar, to a fixed and uniform height of roughly four stories across the entirety of the original master plan.
The discovery of magestone has set off a great deal of excitement at the Honored Guild of Constructors and Architects. Unlike prior experiments with magically-aided construction (see the court case "Hon. Guild of Constructors, Architects, et al, v. Wizard's Assoc. of Etoile", filed 51-4-719 ), magestone buildings are unlikely to require constant reinforcement, as magic is only used to align the material for greatest strength, not as a persistent and fading source of binding power. Visions of new buildings towering ten or twenty stories into the sky are already generating fanciful artwork and murals depicting what a rebuilt Capital City could look like in the future.

Access & Availability

The requirement of a wizard on-site means that, practically speaking, magestone is available only near the Etoile Capital City, as requests for assistance from the Wizard's Association of Etoile from other districts are typically secondary in priority to requests from the Capital.

Discovery

Magestone was discovered when wizards were tasked with finding a way to improve skyrodem, an experimental shaped material made out of crushed aggregate and limestone that is set with water and cured.