Labradorite has two origin stories and I can't decide which one I like more

Bought a labradorite palm stone on impulse because of the way it flashed under the shop lighting — that blue-green sheen that appears at one angle and vanishes at another.

The physics explanation, which I looked up that night: labradorite is a feldspar that separated into alternating microscopic layers as it cooled, over an extremely long time. Light entering the stone bounces between those layers and interferes with itself, and specific wavelengths reinforce while others cancel. The color isn't a pigment. There's nothing blue in there. It's structural — the same reason a soap bubble or a beetle shell shows color. Move your head and the geometry changes and the color leaves.

They named the effect after the stone. Labradorescence. Because the material was described from the Labrador coast in the 1770s, by Moravian missionaries.

But the missionaries didn't find it in an empty place. There's a widely repeated Inuit story attached to it — that the northern lights were once trapped inside the rocks along that coast, and a man struck them with his spear and freed most of the lights into the sky, but some stayed behind in the stone. That's the flash. What didn't get out.

I've since learned to be careful about how these stories circulate; a lot of "ancient legends" attached to crystals in shops are twentieth-century marketing invented wholesale. I haven't been able to trace this one to a solid ethnographic source versus a much-repeated popularization, and I'd rather say that than pretend I've verified it.

Here's what gets me anyway. Both explanations are describing the same thing — light that went into a rock and is still coming back out at an angle. One says interference in lamellar structures. One says the aurora is still in there.

They're not in conflict. They're the same observation with different vocabulary.

I keep it on the windowsill where it catches afternoon light. It goes dark and ordinary about four o'clock. I've never once minded.