Amethyst Lump

Amethyst Lump sits cool in the palm, a stubborn teardrop of violet rock that seems momentarily alive as light threads through its translucent rind. Its surface is a mosaic of tiny facets, rough in places where the crystal thickens, smooth where a careless finger would press and find a answer in the glassy hush of it. The color is a patient, pale lavender, deepening toward the core, with a soft inner glow that suggests it remembers the first spark that ever formed the cave. If you tilt it to the sun, you can watch a minute rain of lavender motes drift, as if the stone itself were breathing. In the telling of it, miners whisper a lore that this is not mere ore but memory, when geode seams crack open, the ether within leaks out as a glimmering pale fog that hardens into amethyst. People swear the Lump holds a heartbeat, a throb that syncs with distant, buried springs, and that when moonlight rides the copper wires of a smithy, the edges flare a little brighter. Used in the field by crafters and couriers alike, the Lump is prized not for brute weight but for potential: broken down, it yields gem fragments that jewelers fit into rings and amulets; heated with the right catalysts, it shines as a tiny, patient lens for arcane work; left whole, it sits as a quiet centerpiece in a display of wares. In the everyday economy of the road, it becomes something more than stone; it becomes a promise of craft, a quiet tool to temper temper and time. I watched a dealer, fingers stained with dust, weigh one of these Lumps against a pocketful of copper. The price wobble was a small map of risk—not so dear that a doodle-headed apprentice would cheat himself out of a meal, and not so cheap that a jeweler would ignore it for the brash glitter of a new toy. At Saddlebag Exchange, the talk of the Lump was steady—price quoted in small copper coins for the rough chunk, then a modest rise when it was refined into a gem or used as a core for a sigil enchantment. The stall's merchant told me the same story you hear everywhere: demand travels on caravans of stories as much as on wagons of ore. A craftsman friend once whispered that the Amethyst Lump keeps a calm in the hand that holds it, a steadiness that helps when a blade edge needs coaxing or a necklace needs a patient, even light. So it passes through hands: mined, weighed, priced, traded, and finally, set to work, humming faintly as it catches the glow of a lamp and, in that glow, reminds us that beauty sometimes begins as a stubborn lump of rock. Some nights, I hear the Lump tapping softly against a pocket, a faint invitation to trust in fragile things. In the end, it is not the price that defines it, but the story it carries from workshop to workshop.