The Girl and the Guardian
Page 89
CHAPTER 17. It is said that the Makers, before they departed, made several devices of great power. One was the Mindstones, another the Vapáglim. (Others say that the Vapáglim were not made by them at all, but forged in secret by a faction of the Rakmaddites, for the exclusive, secret use of the Travellers.)
Knowing that times might come when peoples were sundered by difference of language and culture, the Makers sought to create a stone of interpretation, which would open the patterns of one mind to another, or cause the original intent behind written words to come clearly into the mind of a reader who may come long afterward. Long they studied this challenge, and eventually one of their greatest minds, Treesinger the Third, who had wandered long in the mind-caves of the Crystal entities and thereby came to an understanding of how such a thing could be made. Then they joined in labour to create the Nanites that would weave it. When it was built it was in the shape of a stone not bigger than a man’s hand, oval and flattened like a rounded stone of the river, heavy as a dense stone, opaque and dark. Many were then made by the Nanites, but in the course of the ages all but a few were lost or broken. Perhaps they sit in some riverbed, or under the soil.
For power they needed only the warmth of a hand or the light of the sun to fall upon them, and they would magnify the patterns of thought in the hand of those who touched them. Memories they did not have the power to store; only to transmit the memories and thoughts of the ones who touched them. -Ennead of Aeden, Of the Mindstones.