From an elder druid’s instruction to her apprentice.
You have asked time and time again when you will be given an essar to work with. First, understand what you are asking us to entrust to you.
Our elemental gift descends through old draconic influences. Through channeling, we shape and direct the elements to which we are attuned. Fire answers as flame and heat: gathered, dispersed, or driven along a chosen path. Water can be lifted, divided, or turned into a forceful current. Air moves as wind and pressure, clearing smoke or striking hard enough to break a charge. Earth yields as soil, sand, and stone, allowing us to steady foundations, open fissures, or raise barriers.
An essar crystal helps bring that inheritance into deliberate use. It makes a faint attunement perceptible and an uncertain current easier to guide. Your first task will be to recognize your own influence passing through it. Strength comes afterward.
With suitable preparation, essar can gather elemental energy, amplify existing currents, siphon excess force, or preserve a reserve for later release. They can also anchor workings after their makers withdraw. Each specimen has its strengths: one receives readily but releases reluctantly; another delivers great force yet struggles to sustain a gentle current. A stone well suited to drawing heat from a burning room may require considerable care when returning that heat.
Some elvish soldiers carry wands with essar embedded in the shaft or serving as the pommel. Through these, they concentrate their channeling: casting narrow jets of flame, driving water against an advancing line, or hurling stones with greater precision. The working follows the bearer’s attunement. Each soldier must learn their instrument’s tolerances, for amplification strengthens mistakes, too. One reckless discharge can exhaust a reserve or fracture its vessel.
Among us druids, the staff serves similar purposes, with essar housed within it or mounted at one or both ends. We use these instruments to direct sustained currents and anchor larger workings: turning floodwater from homes, drawing smoke from crowded halls, or bracing earth beneath a failing terrace. The staff carried into battle may be the same one used to protect a village through winter.
An accomplished channeler can perform much unaided. Yet even an elder must rest or attend elsewhere. A prepared essar can sustain a windbreak or regulate the release of stored heat through that absence, until its reserve is spent.
Usable specimens are scarce. Many beautiful stones possess no useful affinity; others cannot endure repeated channeling. Their inner growth must conduct energy without scattering it or gathering dangerous pressure within a flaw. A cloudy fragment may serve for generations while a flawless jewel proves useless.
Suitable growths occur slowly and unevenly, sometimes where elemental influence makes extraction perilous. Careless removal or cutting for beauty can destroy the structure we need. Afterward come testing, preparation, and the long study of a particular stone’s responses. An inherited essar is most valuable when its former keeper’s knowledge survives alongside it.
Repeated strain can make a specimen erratic. Some recover through discharge and rest; others fracture beyond further use. A failing crystal may still save a household in an emergency, at the cost of every future working that depended upon it.
For this reason, village essar are often held in trust. Their keepers tend hearths, waterways, terraces, and wards while preserving the observances that bind households to their ancestors and land. Our duty requires listening, investigation, and sometimes asking every family to share the necessary labor.
Scarcity also gives power. Houses with reliable deposits can equip more soldiers and support more apprentices. Others must borrow, negotiate, or wait. Tradition guides that distribution, though favoritism sometimes speaks in tradition’s voice.
When your time comes, you may receive a little stone in a worn mounting, accompanied by generations of careful records. Learn what it can bear. Learn who depended upon it. Then we will be ready to begin.