Bay 12 Games Forum

Kahrab as a source of Divine Light

Kahrab, formally referred to as ‘child of Barq’, is a form of expression of Allah’s divine will as it descends from the heavens towards the depths of the Earth, most frequently in the visage of a lightning bolt. This is a well-known concept that forms the foundation of all that Moskurg’s Tower of Storms has accomplished throughout the last 25 years.

Throughout this thesis, I make reference to The Wand of Lightning Bolts, invented by al-Damar and his team of Researcher-Priests in 936. The Lightning Wand allows us to bind a sliver of storm-derived Kahrab within its intricate adamantium core, wherein it waits until the core is encouraged to ‘discharge’, at which point it leaps out in the form of lightning once more.

The research presented in this thesis was inspired by Arif al-Barq’s paper on “Kahrab and its Incandescent effects on Graphite”, wherein he described how Kahrab travelling through graphite filaments when slowly discharged from a Lightning Wand causes the filament to radiate heat and light, much like Barq itself, before immediately burning out. The filament was reportedly linked to the Wand and the Earth by thin strips of copper to guide its course, as countless observations of lightning in nature and on the battlefield have proven without a doubt that Kahrab prefers to travel through metal when given free reign. Despite the exciting implications of this observation, further research was cut short by the sudden ubiquity of adamantium, which has become our nation’s defacto source of light (albeit low-intensity) and, more recently, heat.

Potential futility notwithstanding, I have taken it upon myself to see this research to its completion. During my experiments, I discharged Kahrab through numerous filaments of various materials, seeing for myself the wondrous glow and its untimely demise. Please refer to the table of results in the Appendix section of this thesis for a comparative review of the glow times of each filament type. Note that certain metals did in fact produce a glow that lasted even longer than the original graphite strips.

My major breakthrough came about mostly by accident at a point where I was fooling around with what I dub ‘air voids’. Air voids are created when wind manipulation techniques are used to pull air out from a central point, producing a space theoretically devoid of the substance as long as the spell is held. I discovered that filaments, when placed in an air void, glowed with a brightness far exceeding the passive luminescence of adamantium. Moreover, the filaments tested retained this blinding radiance until the Lightning Wand was completely discharged, without being obliterated in the process!

Based on these results, I propose that incandescent filaments can be entrapped in sealed air voids to allow Kahrab-induced production of high-intensity light at our desire. I propose that this may be accomplished via the work of wind-manipulators working alongside glass-makers to create transparent air-voided orbs containing filaments linked to Kahrab channels. This device, which I henceforth name the 'Kahrab light orb’, is one I hope to one day see illuminating the streets and homes of our wondrous nation.