The Staff of the Loom
"You seek the Staff? You are not ready to begin. Live another dozen lives and then we'll see..."
The Staff of the Loom is an item spoken of only in the oldest of stories and legends. Many scholars actively doubt that the staff exists at all, believing it to be a product of the retelling of a story over so many generations the original true tale is lost forever. The story of the staff begins with the Breaking of the World, as so many things within Ashiel do, and ends in the land known by the name Phaenicia. As the story goes, when The Eater was freed and gorged itself upon the world, its great scaled bulk wreaked much havoc upon what remained of the world. Even the torn and loose threads of existence itself proved to not have the power to harm The Eater. In one, and only one, such moment did The Eater's scales abrade one of the threads of exist and tear loose a tiny piece of one. The merest length of fiber from that powerful strand tumbled through the shifting maelstrom that became of the world and passed out of sight and out of mind. Perhaps even out of time itself.
In another place and a very different time, the great nation of Phaenicia has risen to power and held a dominating position over the other nations. The powerful magic of the people was a large part in that and none were more powerful than the Archmage Phaenir, as he became often referred to in many of the retellings. The truest of stories about this place and time refer to Phaenir as The Primus. The fiber reappeared in this tale just before the golden age of prosperity causes Phaenicia to ascend above all other nations. Out of an unusually fierce echo storm, a city was destroyed, only a crater remaining. Within the center of that crater The Primus and his contemporaries, the other powerful wizards known as The Praefectus, discovered the fiber resting on a bed of crystal. The heat and the force of the power with which it had destroyed the city turned much of the crater to crystal.
It was the work of years, and the sacrifice of untold number of wizards, which allowed The Primus to not only transport and contain this tiny piece of existence itself, but to bring magic to bear upon it and to compel it into a physical form which could be touched and wielded. All stories agree that it was the creation and possession of the staff which ushered in the golden age for the nation and allowed it to destroy any enemies, overcome any obstacle and prevent any disaster. This remained the case until the golden age, as it was called, came to an end at the same time the nation itself was destroyed. There are conflicting stories as to how this happened. Some of the tales claim that the Praefectus rebelled against the Primus, and in the battle that followed the staff was caught in the crossfire of powerful destructive magic and "destroyed". A few of the stories say that the staff was made imperfectly and that it was always just a matter of time until its use would end in calamity. Many of the stories agree, however, that it was the intervention of the Gods and the Primus' attempt to use the staff to destroy them which caused it to be broken.
The one thing that is the same across all the tellings is that the destruction of the staff was no simple breaking of a weapon, or even a magic item. The once powerful and great nation ruled by wizards and prospering from magic was destroyed, smote from the very face of the world itself. Traces of it have been found in various lands over the years, but no one had found a place which could be claimed to have been "where Phaenicia once stood" and scholars have been looking for centuries. While the nation has been lost to time, the staff itself, or pieces of it, have surfaced from time to time in various places, always at the center of some sort of trouble. Even though it is no longer whole, the pieces of the staff still hold amazing power, and those with both good and ill intents are always looking for power.
Item type
Unique Artifact
Weight
Ten pounds
Dimensions
Six feet long, around two inches thick.
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