ITEMS · AELVYRENN
The Draughtsman's Glass
A Vyr artificer's sighting-lens carried down from Aelvyrenn — look through it and a made thing shows you its own diagram: the seam that isn't structural, the join that was meant to move, the flaw the maker hid. Athra's way of seeing, ground into glass a lower-world hand can hold. Almost no one who has held one gave it back.
The Vyr are born seeing the Design — the sense that the world is a made thing, drawn before it was built, and that a keen enough eye can read the drawing back out of the object. The Glass is that eye made portable: a thin disc of pale Vyr crystal in a worn bronze rim, and through it the seams of the world light up. A wall stops being stone and becomes a plan — the block that isn't load-bearing, the door bricked over, the ledge cut for a hoist that rotted away. A trap shows its trigger. A lock shows the shape of the ward. It is the finest thing an Explorer can carry into a place built to keep people out, because it does not open the way — it shows you the way was always there. The Vyr did not make it for lower-world hands, and it exacts the maker's own curse. Carry it too long and the sight does not switch off with the Glass down. You begin to see the unfinished diagram under everything — the crack starting in a friend's argument, the join in a lover's face that was meant to give, the flaw the mirror was hiding. The Vyr call this seeing true. The Downcome who inherited it call it the reason their elders are so cold. It is the one Vyr gift that comes with instructions no one wrote down: that to see how a thing is made is to stop being able to love it as whole. No living smith in the Vale can grind another — the light-glass is a recovered thing, not a made one, and the Aether-work that quickens it went silent with the Sundering. There is one, sometimes two, and they surface where the sky-folk's leavings fall.
KIND
relic
SLOT
held
RARITY
legendary
EFFECTS SUMMARY
While held, reveals hidden structural seams within ~10m: secret doors, bricked passages, trap triggers, and ward-shapes on locks glow to the eye (a discovery/traversal aid, not a key — it shows the way, it does not open it). Carried across many days, applies a slow, deepening 'True-Seeing' compulsion: a small standing penalty to disposition gains, framed as the wielder seeing the flaw in everyone.
Connected
Type Fields
All Relationships (3)
expressed_in
- ←Athra, the Endless Design — Athra's gift to the Vyr — reading the Design back out of a made thing — ground into a lens a lower-world hand can hold. The god's way of seeing, made portable, and cursed the way the god's gift is cursed.
created_by
- →The Vyr — A Vyr artificer's instrument, not a lower-world make — recovered from the sky-folk's leavings, never reproduced, and carrying the maker's own alienating way of seeing.
hidden_in
- →Aelvyrenn — The Glass surfaces where the sky-seat's leavings fall — recovering one means reaching Aelvyrenn, or the hard ground beneath it. Buried upper-world technology, placed by distance and danger, exactly the thing an Explorer crosses the world to find.
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