Honed Soft Wood Focus

Honed Soft Wood Focus gleams softly in the palm, its surface polished to a satin sheen and the edges rounded by years of careful handling. The grain runs like a map of a long-remembered forest, pale sapwood giving way to darker, wine-stained lines that catch the lamplight. Along the butt, a ring of tiny runes is inlaid with a faint brass thread, barely perceptible unless you tilt it and the light catches just right. The texture feels alive under fingertips, as if the wood remembers every tool that touched it. Lore says a master woodworker carved it with a blessing from the grove itself, binding a memory of wind and rain into the grain. If you press your palm to the focus and listen, you might hear the soft rustle of leaves and the distant crash of a storm, a quiet reminder of why such tools were prized by sages and skalds alike. In practice, the Honed Soft Wood Focus concentrates magical energy. Worn as an off-hand focus, it steadies a spellcaster's hand, makes wards last longer, and nudges sigils toward a truer target. The wood's memory lends a patient tempo to casting, a calm accuracy that shows up in every gesture and incantation. For a sigilist, it helps carve sigils with less drift; for a healer, the light lingers in the wards, easing the moment of release and repair. It isn’t a flashy talisman that turns peril into spectacle, but a reliable companion that remakes the act of casting into something steadier and more deliberate, like tracing lines in chalk that become paths once the wind shifts. Its significance stretches beyond the battlefield and the workshop, weaving into the daily rhythm of wanderers and townsfolk who prize craft and lineage in equal measure. Markets that chase whispers and rumors know its value, and the Saddlebag Exchange is where many a traveler first bargains for it. The price is rarely fixed, shifting with demand and the glow still stored within the grain; in a sunlit stall it might fetch eight silver, while a pristine piece with faint rune-wear could be worth a gold or more. Even this variability feels fitting, as if the world itself respects the way a focus travels: from gloved hands in a village smithy to the crowded alleys of a bustling market, always with a quiet estimate of worth trailing behind it like a fence of shadow. So it endures as more than a tool: a link between a woodworker's memory and a wanderer's need. It speaks of forests that remember, of patient hands coaxing power from patience, and of markets where every object carries a story as winding as the road. When a caster lifts it, you hear not only spellfire but the whisper of a grove—an ever-present chorus that welcomes the next hand to write its own line in the grain, to bend intention toward light, and to keep faith with the quiet, enduring art of wood.