Alright. A question i've had for a while is where the heartstones found in Solstheim fit into what we know about the Heart of Lorkhan, the red year, and their implications.

To me, it seems likely that heartstones are fragments of the heart of Lorkhan, somehow scattered when red mountain went boom during the red year and coalesced over the decades since. (a thought: will heartstones continue to coalesce? Is the heart of Lorkhan reforming through them, or has it taken a new form and insinuating itself more deeply into the fabric of Nirn?)

Now, as for effects, It seems that these heartstones have a great faculty for tieing souls to Nirn, as well as other magical effects of a similar nature. We seem them used to reanimate two people, one of whome had been dead for quite some time. They might have more powers, given Neloth's interest in them, but what they are a mystery.

More interestingly, they also cause those implanted with them to experience voices and creeping insanity. I'm partial to thinking that the voices are from the spirits of those who died during the red year, somehow merged together / trapped within the heartstones, and implanting one in you gives these spirits access to your mind.

Now, here are the questions resulting from these musings.

1.) Can a heartstone be used as a small-scale anolog for the heart of Lorkhan in certain magics? Could similar magics to what the Dwemer and the Almsivi used on the Heart of Lorkhan be used on the Heartstones with a similar effect?

2.) Is a heartstone inherently corrupting / insanity causing, or is there a way around that problem? If the side-effects of heartstone implantation are caused by the souls resident in the heartstones, would it be possible to 'purge' a single heartstone of its resident souls and use it as normal, without creeping insanity?

3.) To what extent can heartstones be considered individually? In essence, I am asking if all heartstones only represent instances of a larger whole, like nodes on a network, or can a heartstone be isolated as a discrete thing. Either answer has interesting implications.

Thanks in advance for any replies. I've been lurking the forum for about a year now, and have yet to see any topics that dealt directly with the issue.

While I have no idea what the heartstones really are, I can almost guarantee that they are not physical parts of the Heart of Lorkhan. Auriel himself tried to destroy the Heart; it laughed at him. A volcano could very likely do nothing to it, except maybe spit it out whole. All this depends on whether or not the Heart is even in Red Mountain anymore; it disappears during the events of Morrowind, and we have literally no idea what happened to it after that, so it could be anywhere.

Perhaps the heartstones are pieces of rock that were nearest to the Heart of Lorkhan's resting place in Red Mountain, and are therefore imbued with a portion of the power that it radiated?

1. If by similiar you mean something akin to what Arniel got, perhaps. If (semi)divinity, no.

2&3 We don't lnow enough to tell.

This is the most logical option.

That's most likely the case.

I wonder what would happen If someone would strike a heartstone with Keening, Sunder and Wraithguard just like Kagrenac and the Tribunal did.

I didn;t mean to imply that the heartstones were the results of the Heart of Lorkhan's destruction in a physical sense, but I still think that they may be a new manifestation of the heart, given thenir properties, though the idea of the power of the heart rubbing off on the nearby ash is a good one too, and may in the end be more likely.

I don't think anyone who gets their hands on a heartstone will be mimicing vivec anytime soon, but I think there is more room to exploit heartstones for gain than simple soul gems.

Of course - a soul gem in the chest won't let you cheat death (or craft a staff in Neloth's apparatus) like a heartstone does. ;]

Well, now that I think about it, what's the Mantella except a fancy soul gem? That's why Arniel was even capable of using a soul gem for his own experiment.

Of course, now that I think about it more, the importance of the Mantella wasn't that it was a soul gem, but rather that it had the soul of a Shezarrine inside it. Content rather than context, I suppose.

You can try that in Skyrim, I know I did, although, lacking Sunder. Before disappointedly sticking everything back it its box.

Going through the quest related to the the stones, reading the mad women's journal; if we take the voices she's hearing as that of Lorkhan, then it makes no [censored] sense at all. Although, for some reason it seems everyone here thinks Lorkhan was insane himself, so it does sorta make sense if you think that. However, I like the Red Year victims theory.

Are the Ash Spawn souls bound to Nirn by the Heart, or the souls of the victims of Red Year?

Thats why I am debating just how special heartstones are: we know they have something special knocking around inside them, and that something beats at least the residue of Lorkhan's power. I thus find it interesting to speculate on how it could be leveraged.

First, I don't think that the voices are those of Lorkhan, (I think they are the souls of the victims of the red year) but they seem to be . . . twisted . . . in a sense, by the power of whats containing them, like how the sleepers and ash ghouls from morrowind all seem to be mentaly connected, and Vekhing crazy, at the same time.

Thinking it over some more, a likely scenario is that the earth of red mountain, including the ash it spews, was long ago transformed by the power of the heart of Lorkhan, including taking on some of its properties: most significantly, the property that allows it to contain souls. Thus when red year happened, the ash acted like a giant, diffuse soul-gem that soaked up the souls of the victims like a sponge, concentrating them in the form of heart stones, and eventually allowing them to roam around frightening adventurers as ash spawn by the time sjyrim occurs.

So, if I'm right, we have a giant, diffuse pseudo-soulgem full of tthe spirits of half-crazed disaster victims.