Drift

The Dreamvale is made entirely of essence, the magic of emotion and feeling, dreams and ideals, desires and fears, that attach into essence and leak from the material into the vale. This created the plane of emotions, and within the ever shifting landscape of demiplanes and creatures, a physical manifestation of magic exists.

Drift is a powder or sometimes crystallised substance of ever shifting colours. It is magic itself, essence of the planes, solidified.

Primarily a tool for enhancing spell casters or enchanting, Drift as a substance is - in its standard state - volatile. Colourful explosions will ring out if struck incorrectly or if the wrong magic is placed within it. Instead it must be refined to make something less destructive. This process involves "grounding" the Drift via elements of the physical world, such as combining it in water with flakes of heavy metals or sand. This allows Drift to be used in the creation of arcane machinery or as a spell component without the substance exploding.

Sifting Drift is an entire extra-planar economy. The safest way to gather it is to wait for Drift to, well, drift from the dreamvale into the Astra Sea and as clouds of rainbow, arcane energy swell and shift as waves of light. These pockets of the Dreamvale, floating and slowly dispersing into the astral, contain within them a multitude of things. Demiplanes of clashing or similar emotion, elemental beings of pure dream, all cast out with the ever flowing Dreamvale. Most importantly to many, are the shorelines of powdered drift on the edges of demipplanes and where clashing emotions strike, and the higher value crystals formed in demiplanes and hearts of powerful elementals. Astral ships created by the various outer planes and even some powerful material plane individuals hunt for these pockets, and sift the sand and hunt for crystals.

Drift is highly sought after as a powerful and difficult to come by arcane element. The various magical institutions throughout Aesteria have stockpiles of drift, purchased from planar traders and (in rare cases) sifted themselves.