Sun-gold

Summary

Of all the myriad metals and their natures, gold is one that has ever drawn intrigue to itself. Its beautiful splendor and relative rarity made it ideal for art pieces, jewelry, forms of currency, and even magical tools. Like silver, gold is naturally conductive for mana, albeit much more tame and controlled by comparison. Many magic-oriented professions, like mages, anktorlas, and sokral, etc, make extensive use of gold. But, most curious of all for that same gold is how it behaves within sunlight itself.
Raw gold ore, being mixed or fused with various impurities, exhibits little reactivity toward sunlight. When people started refining it, creating purer and purer elemental gold instead, strong reactions in the presence of sunlight became far more noticeable. For many civilizations, this clued them into gold's conductivity with mana, and thus potential applications toward magical ends. The more curious sort, however, wanted to see what would happen the longer gold remained exposed to sunlight.
In the ensuing days of their experiments, the lustrous gold burned in the sunlight, darkening with blotches and streaks of reddish hues. Some thought it erosion, or some kind of impurity surfacing at first; they called it 'copper-gold' due to the striking similarities. Yet, it nonetheless remained elementally pure gold, soaking up the power of sunlight all the while. When night fell, the gold cooled, and the power it'd absorbed diminished with astonishing quickness.
Of the many names it was given, 'sun-gold' stuck as the most common one among people. Smelters, smiths, engineers, priestesses, mages, and more all flocked toward this bizarre and unknown form of gold. The foremost immediate problem was the fact that pure sun-gold essentially gained or lost power in the presence of sunlight. No other form of light, magical or mundane, could charge it. The second problem was pure sun-gold had most of the same physical properties of regular gold–namely being soft and malleable for a metal.
For much of its early history, people weren't truly able to overcome these hurdles. While it made for an interesting and useful supplementary material, all the problems of using it practically kept surfacing again and again. General use of sun-gold faded out over time as other innovations took the stage with their new prominence and better usability. However, some cultures that worshiped sun deities, such as Atenkhet, continued to make regular use of sun-gold.
It became something of a holy metal to them, a physical embodiment of their deity's presence, power, prestige, or otherwise. Many religious civilizations quickly coveted and jealously guarded sun-gold, as challenging as that was. Since all that was needed was gold and sunlight, anyone with access to gold itself could create more sun-gold. The natural outcome ended up with these same groups trying to control all raw gold ore and refined metal as much as possible. It led to direct and regular conflict with magic-oriented groups, who needed to use gold for their magical arts.
In the end, sun-gold became one more reason for bloody conflict among many others.
Still, development of its potential uses continued, albeit slowly. The most well-recorded history of this would be within Atenkhet, whose pantheistic religion of Uatkara upheld Akenra as its main sun goddess. Atenkhet smiths, testing out various sun-gold based alloys, discovered several combinations that became very promising. Of them, steel and palladium-based alloys held the greatest potential. While all the alloys sacrificed some of the power potential of sun-gold, the enhanced physical properties made it imminently more usable. The final piece to the puzzle came in the form of crysium, which could finally be physically integrated into the alloys.
The resulting material of 'crystallized/alloyed sun-gold' (although only smiths called it by the proper name) became the bedrock of Atenkhet's technological advances. Its mana conductivity, retention, and physical durability made it an incredible super material for almost anything they put it toward. While it didn't make for great armor or high-stress physical loads, its potential for magic and enchantments gave it a much different fate.
For example, one of the common problems with enchanted goods is supplying them mana to keep them operational. Most people suffice for solutions based on either crysium, ambient mana absorption, or having people supply the mana themselves. Atenkhet's sun-gold could not only recharge on sunlight, but the crysium infused within could retain that mana throughout the night. They'd created a self-recharging mana alloy based on the greatest source of available energy: the sun.
Dragonkind and the later baarham took an especial, great interest in this version of sun-gold. The unbound potential of such an alloy forever changed the landscape of raw gold, who saw great and terrible attention given to it. Entire currencies based on gold evaporated into engineering and scientific works driven on sun-gold. Gold mines became even more valuable, perhaps enough to rival or even exceed crysium itself sometimes.
Sadly, despite its amazing potential, the rarity of its two main components means sun-gold production is still relatively low and fairly scarce. While crysium can fortuitously appear randomly in mighty eruptions, or areas of great mana concentration, gold does not 'regrow'. Few have the raw resources on hand to even begin experimentation, let alone meaningful development or wide-scale adoption of sun-gold based technologies. In this respect, Atenkhet reigns supreme for not only its available gold resources, but its long and storied history based on sun-gold itself.

Properties

Material Characteristics

In its ingot form, pure sun-gold is largely similar to regular gold in appearance and characteristics. As its charged with sunlight, fiery hues dance across the metal, inscribing burn-like patterns across and within the metal. These hues vary from strong reds to reddish-browns, resembling pure copper in many respects; hence its second name of being 'copper-gold'. These fiery colors faintly glow and shift, as if actual fire, within sunlight-charged sun-gold. Uncharged sun-gold looks inert and somewhat subdued in color, more mundane and ordinary.
Alloyed sun-gold, typically with crysium, still largely matches these characteristics save for speckles of crystal infused throughout it. If the alloyed sun-gold has charge, both the crysium speckles and the fiery hues will glow and show colorful behavior.

Physical & Chemical Properties

Sun-gold is always warm to the touch. The more sunlight it absorbs, the hotter it becomes, though never in a harmful or incendinary fashion. It's rather strange to witness first hand, since an ingot of iron beside sun-gold may scorch one's hand if left out in the same amount of sunlight. The saying 'a seat made of sun-gold' is one deriding wasteful opulence, but also incredible luxury in the persistently comfortable warmth it exudes.
While pure sun-gold has many of the same uses as regular gold, the alloy version sees far more adoption. With the strengths of steel and/or palladium, it is a formidable metal compared to the gold it once was. While it cannot match the raw physical nature of mana-steel, it can more than suffice for many complex applications. Magical crafts and arts, in particular, can be made to work extremely well with alloyed sun-gold.

Compounds

Natural sunlight and gold, the purer the better. Alloyed sun-gold is made with steel and/or palladium, and crysium.

Life & Expiration

Pure sun-gold loses its retained power every night, or when in left in darkness long enough. Curiously, night time has a much harsher effect, causing pure sun-gold to lose its power within hours, if not minutes. Sun-gold contained in darkness loses power steadily over the course of a week before depleting fully. Some scholars speculate it is not necessarily the lack of sunlight that causes a problem, but rather some mysterious property of darkness or the night sky themselves.
Alloyed sun-gold maintains this behavior, but the addition of crysium creates incredible stability. Its power loss is so miniscule as to look like a rounding error than anything truly discernible. Still, if left in darkness for a matter of years, even it would eventually lose its stored power. The exact amount of time varies, and no one really knows what the upper limit is necessarily. Some ignots last for years, decades, or even centuries before their power is fully depleted. The reasoning as to why remains a mystery to metallurgists and mages.

Type

Metal