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Old 07-16-2015, 10:48 AM   #4
William Cloud Hicklin
Loremaster of Annúminas
 
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Join Date: Oct 2006
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William Cloud Hicklin is battling Black Riders on Weathertop.William Cloud Hicklin is battling Black Riders on Weathertop.William Cloud Hicklin is battling Black Riders on Weathertop.
These gems are extraordinarily rare stones, possessed of strange powers, which, remarkably, are found not in the ground but grow in the living tissue of trees- but only in places where there were great discharges of power in the Elder Days by Valar or greater Maiar. One such region is the forest of South Lindon, which still remembers the War of Wrath and the sinking of Beleriand. And yet even there only one tree in a hundred thousand, maybe, will have but the smallest stone.

Such a stone grows with the tree, from smallest sapling to maturity, from speck to in most cases the size of a pea, but to be suitable for a staff the size of a quail's egg. These staffs must be cut and fashioned in such a way that the stone is never disturbed from its place of growth, rather the staff is carved so that the wood surrounding the gem becomes the head. This is a challenging feat of woodworking, contrary to the grain of the wood, because such gems grow not in the dead heartwood of the tree, but take their substance, like the growing tree itself, from the living layer of cambium just beneath the tree's rind.

For this reason they are called by the Elves Ondrifim, or in the Common Tongue, "Barkenstones."

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Last edited by William Cloud Hicklin; 07-16-2015 at 02:41 PM.
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