Janastone

Janastones are resonance shards of High Birth magic. Green-teal in colour, they glow with a faint internal light that brightens somewhat at the touch of a living creature. Janastones are fragments of the Janar moon, which broke roughly in half before the First Era. The first Janastones crashed into Equis and Noctis, their inherent giving rise to the first natural life on those planets.

Because the ties to the Cradle of Creation have been severed, new Janastones cannot be created, and High Birth magic cannot ordinarily be wielded by mortals. Janastones are thus immensely valuable, as the last means for such magic to be used. Most Janastones do not possess enough power to inspire permanent creation (except for simple organisms), but large collections of them can supply enough power to raise entirely new species.

Uremai
In the Third Era, in the region that would later become Rakbana, there dwelt a race of beings called the uremai. Every uremai possessed a special organ which contained a small Janastone, that they were able to use to evolve themselves at will, which is what led to their rapid rise to power.

Living Janastones
Beginning in the Fourth Era, Avarshinah, Immortal of Birth, began creating what she called "Living Janastones:" sentient, indepdently-moving amalgamations of Janastones.

Avarshinah built her Temple, the House of Origins, in Rakbana -- the wasteland that was once home to the uremai. Avarshinah saw that, while the land was an acid-blasted wasteland, it was somehow filled with a variety of (horrible) life. The soil, she discovered, still contained the scattered and worn remains of the Janastones that were once found in the bodies of the uremai who lived there.

Avarshinah went to the largest acid volcano in Rakbana, and there she worked for years to create the first Living Janstone, which she called Replenisher. She bound Replenisher to a type of white moss she fashioned using her High Birth magic, and it was Replenisher's task to spread the moss outwards from his fixed place in the volcano.

Over centuries, the moss covered all of Rakbana. Its purpose was to scavenge the infinitesimal pieces of Janastone scattered about the wasteland and bring them together, where, in the heart of the acid volcano, they were transformed into new Living Janastones.

Some two dozen of these beings were created, at which point Avarshinah hired some adventurers to terminate Replenisher and begin the next stage of her plan: bringing them all together to reconnect the Material Plane to the Cradle of Creation.

Her plan ultimately failed, and most Living Janastones were instead consumed to pave the way for the beginning of Aal's resurrection.