First appearance: Into the Mirror 10 Shatter + Into the Mirror 11 Mortaurios · watch it on YouTube
Soul gems are what’s left of a person when they don’t quite finish dying. In the sands of the world beyond the mirror, they turn up wherever someone ceased to be alive: shards of a soul that weren’t completely obliterated into sand. The locals cut them, polish them and spend them like coins. That is a grim enough economy before you hear the rumor that the souls might still be inside.
Description
Most soul gems are green. They glow a pale jade and have an ethereal light inside them, and they come shaped, polished or rough-cut depending on who has been handling them. People have been gathering them for “the hundreds and thousands of years” this place has existed, though nobody can say exactly how long that is. They break the gems into smaller pieces to barter with, and they trade some precious metals as well, but soul gems are the real currency.
Their value may not stop at money. Whispers say the gems still contain the souls they came from and can be used in arcane ways, and some people collect them for exactly that reason. Size matters too: the bigger the gem, the younger the creature was when it died. A large gem holds more of a life that was never lived.
In the end, it was put bluntly:
“The soul gems are dead people.”
History
The party first learned about soul gems in and around Mortaurios, in Into the Mirror 10 Shatter + Into the Mirror 11 Mortaurios (ITM session 3). Cerys asked how people paid for things and remembered what she had been told: that the money of this place was dug out of the sand where people had died.
At the royal audience in Into the Mirror Session 4 (YouTube parts 12–13) - Royal Audience and Otherside, the party saw what a great deal of the dead looks like when worn as a crown. The old king slumped on his throne like a statue. Beside him the queen sat poised and upright, and her crown was made of soul gems that glowed a brilliant pale jade green. Later in the same session, a member of the party heated sand in a stone cup in a giant fireplace and cast two small, rough-oval glass gems, “so that they can carry their friend around as a remembrance stone.” Toddleheim offered his mason’s tools (“I am a dwarf, so I can probably help”). The glass came out shiny and reflective, close in color to the soul gems traded in the city but not as bright: “an echo of something of that nature.”
After the fight with the dragon, in Into the Mirror 14 — The Scholar, Cerys came away with something the party had never seen before. The white soul gem is about the size of her palm, large, uncut and rough. Instead of the usual green, it is clear white like a diamond, though it holds the same ethereal inner light as the others. Cerys still has it, and nobody yet knows what its color means.
In Into the Mirror 17, The Way Out, the party studied another find whose color and texture were almost exactly those of the city’s soul gems, only far larger. Flynry asked whether it matched the gem that Locket is made of. It was “similar, but not the same.” Locket died in the Sands of Eternity, an afterlife where a soul that dies dies forever, and the party hopes her soul gem might somehow bring her back. Whether that is possible remains unknown.
The same session showed that the gems matter politically as well as financially. When Elianna asked why some people were barred from the city, one of the exiles explained: “Thrown out for speaking a little too loudly against the monarchy. Trying to keep a few extra soul gems for ourself. Making waves generally… many of us just don’t have a place within the walls. We don’t serve a function.”
As the mirror’s surface clouded and swirled behind the party’s reflections, Sky backed away with a parting shot: “I hope we meet again and hopefully the next time you’re not passing through here as soul gems.” Cerys answered: “Ha! Funny. I hope not.”