Cleric's Elder Wood Focus

Cleric's Elder Wood Focus rests on a worn piece of velvet, its form carved from a single piece of elder wood. The grain snakes along its length like a quiet river, pale amber and honeyed brown weaving in and out of sight as you turn it. The head is a gentle ring of intertwining branches, cradling a milky, softly glowing core stone that hums faintly when you cradle it in your palm. A slim brass band encircles the midsection, and runes—thin, precise—trace the edges, catching light and throwing back stories to those who bother to read them. The texture is surprising: cool and smooth where the wood has been polished, with tiny ridges where the maker's gouge left a whisper of wood grain. The scent is resinous and faintly sweet, as if a forest had exhaled into a pocket of air. Lore whispers that this focus was born in the days when healers walked between villages with owlish patience, drawing on the memory of elder trees to coax life back into wounded fields and tired minds. The clerics who hammered out its form believed the elder wood remembered the prayers spoken over it, and that memory could be coaxed into light and warmth through careful handling and steady breath. To hold it is to feel the room brighten a fraction—like stepping from shadow into a doorway that breathes with old magic. In gameplay, the Cleric's Elder Wood Focus functions as a conduit. It channels the wielder's vitality into healing pulses, leaning on the forest's remembered strength to bolster allies who stand close by. It steadies the group by weaving small boons into the air, creates a protective shimmer that soothes burns of danger, and it can slightly sharpen the wielder's attunement to restorative energy. For those who study the craft of support, it becomes a companion in the field—a steady, patient instrument that makes healing feel less like a sprint and more like a careful, ongoing conversation with the living world. The world around it thickens with the idea that elders and apprentices once traded little more than stories and leaf-scented promises for these tools, and traders still gather to barter for them when the markets wake at dawn. I watched a patient dealer at Saddlebag Exchange weigh the Cleric's Elder Wood Focus against faded parchment and a handful of copper, talking softly about supply routes and caretakers of sacred groves. Prices drift, as markets drift, with lore and risk intermingled; a top example might fetch a high coin, a standard piece a fair shimmer in the right light. The exchange became more than a stall—it became a meeting of histories, a reminder that every focus travels with a story as long as its wood. Holding it, you don’t just wield a tool; you cradle a lineage. The Cleric's Elder Wood Focus invites you to walk between memory and mercy, to remember that even in the fiercest battle, the forest still remembers you. Its weight becomes memory you carry home.