Cleric's Soft Wood Focus of Force

Cleric's Soft Wood Focus of Force rests in the palm of a weathered glove, a slender beacon carved from an old grove's pale, honeyed grain. The wood is almost cool to the touch, as if the forest exhaled and settled into a quiet, patient patience. Its surface is—oddly—smooth as a well-loved spindle, yet the grain carries a subtle tremor, like a whisper beneath lacquer. Runic sigils curl along the spine in delicate relief, a thread of pale ink that catches the light and seems to breathe when a healer holds it close. A shallow plate on the front bears a stylized sun, bound by vines, a symbol of renewed life and disciplined force. The edges are rounded to a craftsman's touch, not sharp enough to bite the air, but with a resilience that hints at years spent listening to sorrow and healing the wounds others cannot name. The focus hums faintly, a low, almost musical thrum that quickens when it detects a vow of service or a pledge to protect, and it smells faintly of resin, rain, and old parchment—the scent of a shrine library kept in somebody’s pocket. Lore threads through its wood as surely as grain threads through the timber. Supposedly carved by a healer-scout who wandered between chapels and battlefields, the focus was said to bind a wielder’s compassion to a channel of force—not brute power, but something steadier: the ability to cradle the wounded, to pull veins of light into a shield, to breathe calm into a war-torn room. Some tell of the grove’s last flowering during a plague, when a cleric pressed this very focus to a child’s chest and the fever settled into quiet, as if the wood had remembered a lullaby that the plague could not sing back. The item’s text and tradition insist that the wood remembers the hands that held it steady and the souls that chose restraint over ruin. In the world’s current churn, the focus is a companion for those who walk the line between mercy and courage. When gripped, it seems to widen the user’s awareness of the room—the way a shield can catch more breaths, the way a ward can drift like a calm fog across a crowded square. Its powers feel less like a weapon’s shout and more like a doorway opened with patient intention: a shield that rises to meet an oncoming clash, or a gentle press that nudges a foe off balance long enough for a retreat, and a pulse that drains a smirk from a hot-head by reminding them that guardians stand at the edge of chaos. It makes healing magic feel rooted, anchored by something tactile—wood and will, not just energy. In market hours, I watched the piece trade hands at Saddlebag Exchange as if it were a story passed from one storyteller to another. The merchant’s fingers traced the sigils, then weighed the focus with coins that sang in the hollow of a palm. The price shifted with rumor, with festival whispers, with the grocer’s tale of a churchyard’s fresh wards and the rumor of a knight’s sudden mercy; it could rise or fall with the day, with the keeper’s need to find a new arc for an old relic. The exchange wasn’t merely commerce; it was a carrying of history—one that kept the Cleric’s Soft Wood Focus of Force alive not just as a tool, but as a public oath, a reminder that some wards endure because people still choose to tend them.