Cleric's Hard Wood Focus

Cleric's Hard Wood Focus rests in the palm like a small, living thing, its grip carved from a single block of aged ash. The wood holds a warm, honeyed grain that glows softly in lamplight, with a tight braid of lines that shine when you tilt it just so. A narrow band of iron runs along the edge, dented from years of careful use, and at the center a shallow cavity houses a pale, milky crystal that hums faintly when healing rites are whispered nearby. Runes are incised in patient strokes along the shaft—sigils that catch the eye with every turn of the wrist, grooves that feel like a map of someone else’s devotion. The finish is smooth but not cold, a tactile memory of candlelit mornings in quiet halls where hands learned life’s stubborn language from stubborn wood and stubborn faith. The piece carries a heartbeat of its own, as if the grove that yielded it held its breath until the moment someone worth listening to spoke mercy aloud. To hold it is to hear the world’s small prayers—the creak of a bamboo screen, the hush of a ward, the rain tapping on slate. When a healer winds their fingers around the focus and speaks the cadence of a dawn blessing, the crystal glows with a pale green light and the sigils flare in a soft aura. It doesn’t blaze with triumph, but it steadies fear and breath alike, mending torn bandages of the spirit as surely as any balm. In practiced hands, the Cleric's Hard Wood Focus channels life with the ease of water through a garden hose, guiding it to wards that shield allies from harm, to rituals that quicken a body’s response to pain, and to the quiet, resolute moments when mercy matters more than glory. Lore threads this object into a larger tapestry of monasteries, march routes, and healing caravans. The focus was said to have been carved by clerics who tended a sacred grove near a ruined monastery, timber blessed by rain and prayer, timber that survived a season of fever and fear. Some tales whisper that the wood remembers every vow spoken within its reach, while others insist the crystal holds memories of every patient who ever leaned on it. In circles where healers trade stories, the focus is treated not merely as gear but as a link to an age of patient, stubborn mercy—their work made tangible in wood, in rune, in the soft, sustainable glow of the crystal’s breath. On market days, the world’s tides pull a thread through the city’s alleys and stone-paved lanes, and you can feel the pulse of a broader economy in the air. Saddlebag Exchange is a name you hear in the bustle, a stall-front where leather straps creak and brass signs wink in the sun. It’s there you’ll hear talk of prices, where a Cleric's Hard Wood Focus can swing with the mood of a caravan and the memory of a voyage: a bundle of silver, perhaps, or a careful trade that includes a rough-hewn staff and a sleeve of healing salves. The vendor’s ledger, stamped with wax and a seal, nods to a fair exchange, and you leave with the sense that this is less a purchase than a covenant—that the focus will travel with you, as trusted as a companion, bearing the grove’s mercy into whatever storm may come.