Goblin Squad Member
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According to the Emerald Spire book, the spire was constructed by
The Spoilers were masters at manipulating a particular variety of magical green crystals. Recently, a bunch of magical green crystals popped out of the ground in the Crusader Road area, and they're being held aloft by streams of glowing magic.
My proposal has two parts - Essence Nodes and the War of Towers.
Essence Nodes
The glowing essence nodes mark the location of crystals buried too deep to excavate themselves. They bleed excess magic to the surface, but the crystals themselves might be hundreds of feet down. The magic has various paths to the surface available from each crystal formation, and it emerges at different locations based on interactions with Golarion's magical field. (This explains why we can't dig straight down to the crystals, and why essence nodes appear to move.)
The War of Towers
Until recently, the crystals around the Towers were buried a few feet, or a few tens of feet, below the ground. A once-in-a-millennium alignment of planets, stars, and planar influences is currently flooding the green crystals of the Crusader Road area with far more magic than they can hold. The shallow crystals excavated themselves, and we're fighting over access to their magical emanations. (To explain why the magic is clearly streaming up toward the crystals, rather than down away from them, we could also say that the visible crystals are just the shattered tips of long crystal formations that extended toward the surface, instead of calling them small, shallow formations.)
When the War of Towers ends, and the crystals are no longer floating around the Towers, that will represent the end of the Great Alignment, or the last of the excess energy from the Great Alignment having been burned off by the crystals.
Note: The Emerald Spire book also supports strange effects occurring near the Spoilers' crystals during alignments. This one just happens to be the most powerful alignment in centuries.
Essence Nodes will continue to exist after the War of Towers because the crystal network is always drawing power from the cosmos, and the Spoilers aren't around to use that energy. The big difference is that during the War of Towers, some crystals are bleeding so much magic it lifts them out of the ground. The rest of the time, they stay buried.
The biggest extension of this theory beyond what was spelled out in the book is the idea that the crystals extend much farther around the Crusader Road area than the writers of the book realized. We shouldn't blame them too harshly for the oversight. When you try to write a scholarly text by committee, sometimes little errors creep in.
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Goblin Squad Member
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The magical energy from the crystal network could be the source that Pharasma is tapping to fuel our serial resurrections. It also explains why we can't leave the area: without this constant flow of magic, we'd almost certainly stop resurrecting, and we just might crumble to dust.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Three cheers to this idea! A in world reason for the situation of the game. I approve.
Thank you.
The essence nodes really seem to bother some people. Random patches of useful plants, piles of garbage, and outcrops of ore are apparently much easier to gloss over than shimmering curtains of magic.
Commendably done Karlbob! Thank you for giving us this :)