And So It Moves

One mystery that obsessed many early natural philosophers was the mystery of Eliéra's unusual spin, and its curious stability despite the dragging effect of various tidal forces in play.

In the late 900s, this would give rise to the legend of the Great Movement, at first in the musings of sorcerer-engineers and ecumenologists extrapolating from the simple gyroscopic balances used in everything from compasses to clanks, who believed that these spin characteristics might be explained by a similar gyroscopic system embedded deep within the planet and serving as a reaction wheel on a massive scale.

These musings were swiftly picked up and embellished by the authors and publishers of scientific romances and penny awesomes, which brought the concept into the public eye, where it rapidly captured the popular imagination. Ariadne Steamweaver's trilogy - To Seek the Great Movement, The Day the World Stopped, and The Gears of Earth and Heaven - regarded to this day as classics of the genre, can be credited with popularizing the name of the device and its housing.

In the following decades, many well-equipped spelunking expeditions were sent out by various groups seeking the Great Movement Chamber. These expeditions did succeed in mapping a large volume of the Eliéran Underdeeps, especially in the regions beneath the Talíär and the caverns near the Rim, deemed the most likely locations by the "fast-wheel" and "large-wheel" hypotheses, respectively. They also discovered the first of the penetrations in the planetary core which would, 200 years later, form the basis for the World Shafts.

But no trace of the Great Movement Chamber was ever found. Not would it ever be, since as we know today, the world's spin is stabilized by the aggregate effect of billions of molecular gyroscopes distributed throughout the core's matter editation layer.

Our Extraordinary World
Efíäthe Amólí