Zosimos

Zosimos was an ancient Adept and scholar of Alchemy who was most notably for his theory on condensing the power of the elements, which eventually provided the basis for the creation of the Elemental Stars.

## History

Zosimos was considered to be one of the most influential Alchemical scholars of his age. While he engaged many notable scholarly endeavors throughout his life, several of which advanced civilization, he was best known in later times for his theoretical framework for how to condense the power of the elements.

Alchemists were for centuries interested in the possibility of condensing Alchemical power into usable forms. Psynergy Stones, which consisted of condensed, non-elemental Alchemical power imbued into crystals, were a major inspiration for these researchers. However, Psynergy Stones had a fundamental limit for how much power they could store, were notably unstable to outside influence, and always stored power in a non-elemental form. Ancient philosophers and alchemists sought a way to condense even greater amounts of Alchemical power, especially power aligned with a particular element, into a form which could be held stable and used consistently by Adepts. However, their efforts almost universally proved futile; elemental power invariably became highly unstable when held at high concentrations.

Zosimos spent the later decades of his life dedicating himself to this challenge. Ultimately, he formulated an in-depth theory on how it would be, at least hypothetically, possible to store an immense amount of elemental power in a single place. By thoroughly studying the intricate structures of Psynergy Stones, and performing countless experiments in his laboratory, he came up with a theoretical, unbelievably complicated geometric structure which could contain elemental power in a stable way. Zosimus predicted that, if such a structure was created, it would be so unbelievably complex that it would need to house more than 60% of the elemental power of that given element which existed in all of Weyard. This structure would only be "stable" because it would exist in a permanent state of collapse, where it would constantly fall apart but then reconstitute itself in a uniform manner. Zosimos predicted that, should such an object exist, the constant collapse and reconstitution would make it harmful for any human to touch, as well as emit a constant light; this latter characteristic led Zosimos to dub the theoretical object an "Elemental Star", which would constantly twinkle with light just as the stars in the sky do.

Although the theoretical framework for creating the Elemental Stars was entirely Zosimos's, he personally advocated against ever creating such a thing, writing, "The complexity of creating such an object, should it even be possible, would require such an unreasonable amount of elemental power (described earlier in this work) as to be absolutely unviable; draining such an immense amount of elemental power of a given element from Weyard would throw nature out of balance to such an extent that the world would surely end within a span of a decade at most. Even if all four elements were turned into Stars at once, balancing out the effects on the elements, the effects on Weyard would surely be so incredible as to doom it to eventual destruction"

Zosimos's work and subsequent warning was enough for nearly all contemporary Alchemists to abandon their ideas of concentrating elemental power, with the exception of certain individuals such as Phestia, who pursued fundamentally different approaches (with Phestia's in particular eventually bearing fruit).

Several decades later, long after the death of Zosimos and following the Four Nightmares, The Custodians ultimately used Zosimos's theory to successfully create the four Elemental Stars, draining an incredible amount of Alchemical energy from Weyard, plunging it into a state of hibernation which would not be undone for a millennium.