Silverdyne

Summary

When there is a weapon, there is armor to stop it. Where there is magic, what is there to stop it? If there is something to stop magic, how does it stop magic's effects? These questions and more have been an age old problem, dating to the first time a being committed violence onto another. There has never been a singular solution to magic: any defense must be tuned toward that specific magic. Thermal insulation and fire retardant is meaningless against water and veltron, for example, while hampering fire and somewhat electricity‌.   Enter silverdyne, a curious problem child in the history of materials. Silver, like gold, is magically conductive. The problem becomes silver is too good at being magically conductive. Mana infused into it goes wildly out of control, distorting magic to catastrophic ends. To be able to harness this takes unreasonable skill, and so despite the potential, many civilizations looked past silver's applications. Dragons, typically stubborn and obsessive, had a few who wouldn't give up on it. They continued to refine and tweak silver over the ages, trying to find that perfect mixture.   What eventually popped out changed the magical landscape forever.   By harnessing silver's extreme conductivity and alloying it with grounding reagents, they developed a sort of mana-redirection material. The silver would conduct the incoming mana through fixed lines, shunting it to wherever the line would go. When affixed into surrounding material, such as thermal insulation, it could effectively 'redirect' the magic into said material. Much like a river suddenly being pushed by a door, the magic wasn't negated--simply made to go somewhere else. So followed the first real developments in magical defenses, and the idea of redirection solidified as the de-facto standard.   Silverdyne became incorporated into all sorts of defenses, from elegant cloths to entire suits of armor. War saw its mettle put to the test, and it did alright all things considered. It couldn't negate all the secondary effects that magic did, after all. Veltron magic still had kinetic energy and the weight of dirt, fire burned oxygen or superheated internals, water left people wet/drowning or similarly hit by kinetic energy, and so forth. It did make existing defenses against magic better, objectively, and so it has since become a common adoption.   It has certainly put the perspective of magic power into focus. Of the two, offensive power remains a step ahead, and defensive options ever struggling to keep pace. Magic to counter magic is by far the norm, but for those who cannot do so, silverdyne-enhanced goods are there for them.   For those actually crazy enough to use silverdyne as a magical weapon or tool, it can offer some astonishingly capable options. The practical problem is one becomes locked into training only with silverdyne equipment because of how difficult it is to wield for that purpose. Some of the longer lived peoples, like jiuweihu use this as a benchmark to measure one's mistressly of certain skills. It isn't much of a stretch to say some of their more unbelievable feats can be traced back to silverdyne-based equipment.