prokopetz:

niche-pastiche:

prokopetz:

qtplatypus:

prokopetz:

More poorly thought out yet incidentally useful enchantments:

• A flying castle full of fabulous treasure. Unfortunately, the flying enchantment was calibrated to the precise weight of the treasure; any significant decrease in weight causes the whole building to go shooting off into the stratosphere, while any significant addition – like, say, the weight of the royal family – causes it to settle to the ground. The treasure has long since been removed to less finicky storage (and carefully replaced with rocks of equal mass), but the castle itself remains in use as a mobile observation platform.
• A river that flows uphill. Somehow it never occurred to the enchanter that a backwards river necessarily originates in the sea; as a result, the water is saline, rendering it useless for drinking and irrigation and playing havoc with the riverside ecosystem. On the plus side, having rivers that go both directions has been a great boon for inland trade.
• A forest whose trees bear flawless sapphires of enormous size as fruit. Though intended as a source of boundless treasure, owing to the abundance of the forest’s output and the impossibility of securing its borders, in practice it’s depressed the value of gem-grade sapphires throughout the region, to the point that they’re worth less than common quartz. The ready availability of large, high-quality sapphires has, however, led to enormous advancement in the science of optics in nearby kingdoms.

Having a river that flows uphill is also a massive source of power.

True, though It’s only a better power source than a regular river if the water comes back down again. As I’m picturing it, it doesn’t; the main course continues uphill until it reaches its “source” high in the mountains, where the water completes its inverted cycle by streaming up into the sky, shedding its mineral content in the process and leaving behind twisting spires of sea-salt dozens or hundreds of feet high.

(The salt-maze is a potentially lucrative target for adventurers, if they can survive the environment, as anything that’s been washed upstream eventually winds up there. Watch out for salt dragons!)

Then it’s an incredibly useful source of salt instead. All of that salt in one place, is enough to build an extremely prosperous city around.

Very large salt dragons.