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Dreamstone is an opaque stone with a satiny sheen.
Tiny, swirling trails of brilliant color cover its surface,
interrupted routinely by patches of shimmering white. There are
white, pink, red, green, and black varieties.
The legendary Dwarven city of Kalaza held a
remarkable dreamstone mine, but it was buried and sealed after the
coming of the Red Rot, and the dreamstones lie somewhere in the
darkness with the dead of Kalaza. Today, the best dreamstone mine is
on Teras Isle, but other islands on both sides of Elanthia have
since proven to hold deposits of dreamstone as well.
An old Dwarven legend recounts that, although
Lorminstra had agreed to return certain souls into life, her clerics
were unable to find the dead bodies and aid them fast enough to
enact her will, and that Lorminstra turned to Eonak for aid. Eonak
crafted a huge bell of mithril with a clapper of black dreamstone,
and Lorminstra cast her will into it. Whenever an adventurer dies,
the mithril bell will ring, and those who are properly sensitive may
learn of the death by sensing its toll. Clerics and savants are most
noted for this ability, but it has been noted and recorded in people
from every walk of life, most of whom have chosen an adventuring
life themselves.
Dreamstones are remarkably suited to enhancing
latent telepathy and telepathic spellcasting, although they convey a
direct verbal component much more strongly than other kinds of
telepathy.
The communication-enhancing properties of
dreamstone were first discovered by the dwarves, but they were first
fully utilized by the elves when the dwarves came to assist in the
Undead War after the destruction of Vaalor's forces at the Battle of
ShadowGuard. Dreamstone meant that battles could be coordinated by
elves wearing dreamstone amulets rather than through drums and
banners, and the incredible enhancement in communication was
directly responsible for halting the advance of Despana's forces.
After the destruction of Maelshyve, Illistim mages
discovered a way to imprint the peculiar properties of dreamstone
upon a small globe of rock crystal, creating the first common
crystal amulet. For over ten thousand years, only the elves
controlled the secret of crafting a communication amulet that was
not composed of pure dreamstone, and they guarded the secret
closely. When attempting a quite different experiment, however, a
Dwarven mage of the Gulroten Clan stumbled across a viable method
for imprinting the dreamstone essence not only upon crystal, but
upon a variety of other gems as well, and he spread the word until
the dominance of the elves in this realm was no more.
Among the elves, a gift of a dreamstone means, "I
wish I understood you better." If a husband gives a dreamstone to
his wife, or a wife to her husband, then it is both an admission of
marital trouble and an expression of the desire to overcome that
trouble. The one exception is a black dreamstone, which is an
expression of despair and of a separation that will only cease in
death. |
