By Lady Emily
I’ve borrowed heavily from the writings of Kaerlin in this treatise, and all italicized entries are taken from his writings. Kaerlin lived during the Alais Reign in Masalla. He was obsessed with his work, and did not marry until his 56th year. His wife took readily to his travels, and aided him in writing his next two books. Then, the two of them disappeared in Kaerlin’s 62nd year. They were exploring in Jedda, attempting to uncover the secrets of a particular volcano. And that was the last anyone heard of them.
". . . and there, looking up at me, was a skull, half-emerged from the rock. But the skull, I found, was of stone. What odd creature made this?"
9;
From Musings of a Man in Stone, by Kaerlin.
The text above is from a volume that dates back to over seven hundred
years past. Kaerlin was obsessed, you see. Obsessed with stones. Arcane Alchemy ruled the philosophy of his time, and to the alchemists, rocks were the bones of the earth, the embodiment of earthen elemental power. But Kaerlin challenged their views, pointing out that rocks came in all manner of types, some lighter and some more dense, some shaped as crystals and others smooth, like frozen liquid. Kaerlin dispensed entirely with the alchemical philosophies of the age, gaining himself the reputation of being radical, ignorant, and rather deluded.
The fossil shown at left is from Kaerlin's collection in Masalla.
9;Still, he wrote on, and explored far and wide in search of different types of stone. He typified and classified, and served to teach us much about the habits of rock. He observed that some rocks ‘grew’ in the same locales, and seemed to enjoy each other’s company. He stated that there were three families of rock – the glasses, which were translucent and tended to either grow in clusters or huge ‘globs’, (he included gemstones in this category), the compressed, which were stones made up of other stones which had been crushed together, and the unifieds which were stones that were uniform in color and texture.
And then, one day, he found a fossil, and he never again was the same.
9;"It was a shell, there in the stone. A clam shell, nothing more, but it struck me to my knees, for I was far from the ocean. Probing, touching, my eyes went wide in disbelief. For the shell was not of chalk, but of stone! A new search began."
9;
His search was fevered. It was as if he had been overlooking them before, because he began a vast collection of carefully gathered specimens. Shells were first, and then pieces of bone, and then eggs, and skulls, and strange creatures he could not name."Why of stone?" he wondered. "Carefully I have watched bones of dead animals. Those that are not eaten by animals quickly decompose, so that none, left in nature, are recognizable after a single year."
He constructed small, mesh containers on his lands, into which he placed bones, shells, and animals which he found dead. But they all, with time, decomposed.
In his quest for an answer, he turned to those he had forsaken, and took himself to the alchemists. To them, the answer was clear.
"They tell me that an alchemical process has shifted the bone to rock. I suppose that I may have said the same thing. The encouragement came, however, when one of them told me that they could do experiments to see what would shift the bone to rock. I could then, of course, extrapolate and determine what natural processes might duplicate whatever processes the alchemists utilized."
But none of the alchemists were successful in converting bone to rock.
Kaerlin died without the answer to his riddle, and even today we know not what fossils are, nor why they exist. Because some skulls do not match any now known, many have proposed that ancient races of animals might once have lived upon Carador, whose bones were made of rock, and who died or disappeared, just as the Great Wyrms did.
Others point to the basilisk, a rare creature whose saliva slowly petrifies living flesh into a stone-like state. Perhaps, they say, basilisks were once more common, and fossils are the remains of their ravages. This theory, though quite popular, does not hold well to scrutiny, since petrified corpses, when cracked open, have been reported to be solid stone throughout, and contain no definable traces of organs or bones.
What then, do these fossils represent?
"It is the mystery that drives me," Kaerlin wrote.
"The search, and the journey. I have seen a thousand animals, their bones preserved forever in stone, the empty eyes of the skulls looking out upon my soft, living flesh. What do they think of me? Doubtless, to them, I am just as much a mystery. Perhaps, in the end, it is not so important that we know and conquer, but that we try."For us, then, fossils remain objects of beauty and intrigue, and a subject of endless debate for sages. But the next time you find one, remember Kaerlin, and take a moment to muse on what, in truth, fossils might be.
Kaerlin’s fossil collection, comprising 2,249 specimens, is housed in the great Museum of Masallan History in Mina’s Quay.