Enchantment of Arms and other Material Goods

I tell you it was absolutely ab-surd, the very notion! To shoot a fireball at the king! I simply couldn't believe it! "Do not let him, sire," I pleaded with him, and I meant it. I had positively thought that that arcanist was a fraud, to suggest such a thing. Insane! But would you believe it, the king, Hvaldir, who I'd thought a shrewd, allowed it! And then, when the mage cast the spell and the flash shone bright, my wife fainted! And I nearly did! But, to the amazement of the whole of the room, the king stood untouched. He commanded the mage to try harder, and harder, and harder, and the most he could do was "warm my face like a good hearth!" the king said. Of course, I ordered three of those amulets straightaway.

-- A Nurnen noble to his friend

  The astute scholars among you, dear readers, may have noticed that all of our magic comes from the River, and therefore must be drawn from another dimension, so to speak, and therefore does not reside in this Material realm. This is technically true, if you consider "magic" to be the energy of the River in its true and unaltered form. Such energy existing in our plane would wreak widespread havoc and would threaten to tear the veil between planes. However, the same energy can be made latent, bound to matter from our plane and safely stored away in a stable state, ready to be drawn out again by a mage of sufficient skill.   Items in our world each have a specific capacity to hold magical energy. Different materials are able to hold different amounts of energy, and larger objects can hold more than smaller objects of the same material composition. This has led some arcanists to speculate that all objects are made up of many, many very small ones, each with a fixed amount magical "storage capacity." A rather outlandish theory in my opinion, but perhaps it does have some basis in reality -- these arcanists know better than I, of course. I wonder then, if there is a "biggest size" that something can be?   More to the point, the raw amount of power stored is an important metric, but is not always the most important one. An example: Say a mage simply wants an easy-to-access store of power from which he can pull the necessary energy to cast a spell without reaching across the dimensional curtain between the River and the Material plane (which would require far more exertion). In this case, the important thing to consider is the raw amount of energy stored away to be pulled from. If, however, we examine the common case of an enchanted item such as armor, the actual amount of energy does not matter nearly as much. Rather, it is better to use material which itself can hold more energy per area. We say that in this case it is the per-area storage capacity that matters far more than the total amount stored, as long as the amount stored is enough to cast the desired effect. This is why you will discover that while non-enchanted arms and armor are typically made of steel, through and through, those items which are made to be enchanted are often steel alloyed with some special metal, often yllurian, which has a more favorable per-area storage capacity than steel.   Let us first consider the case that sheer capacity is what we are after. The object(s) designated to hold the energy we capture is called a sink. The critical problem, at first glance, would seem to be efficiently charging the sink with enough energy to last us the duration of our spellcasting. It is intuitive to assume that a spell that shall last three hours should require three hours of charging time in order to collect the proper amount of energy. But if this were true, then the benefits of storing the energy for future use would be lost, as the same amount of exertion (probably even more exertion) would be attained all while taking twice the time it would take to just cast the damn thing. Given this revelation, it would likely be unsurprising to many of you that I should tell you that this is indeed not the case. Charging the sink is an almost instant process for those skilled in manipulating the River, and would only take a few seconds for even a novice. The sink acts just as an empty bucket dipped in a river. All the caster has to do is open a small, small connection between the sink and the river and the energy will flow in just as water into an empty bucket, filling it in a very short time. The caster will then be able to drain this "bucket" as slowly or as quickly as she should like at a later time.   From this metaphor of buckets and rivers, the thing to take away is if your spellcasting will require you to immediately upend the bucket you have just filled, you probably need a bigger bucket, for what is the point of storing this energy when you must immediately use it all. Sinks are traditionally used, at least in druidry, only for very long, otherwise arduous ritual spells, such as the spells needed to discern the health of a large region of forest, or to detect life over a vast area, which can take almost a full week each to cast. The amount of energy needed for each second of these spells is very small, but maintaining an opening to the river is very trying of mortal bodies, and only the most practiced and endurant magi can hold such a connection for more than half of an hour.   Moving on to items such as weapons, armor, amulets, and other small trinkets, we must now consider the per-area storage capacity of the material we wish to use. With the prior case, we were only concerned with the amount of energy that could be stored, but not the amount of material that we needed to use to store it. Now, though, with enchanted armor and personal items, nobody wants to be hauling around one-hundred pounds of cork or wearing one-hundred pounds of yllurian steel. There are generally two approaches to avoiding these problems. The first, often used with beautiful jewelry and fashionable trinkets that need to be very, very small, is to find a material (often a very expensive one) that has an extremely high per-area storage capacity, such as the rare deepwater Igurius Pearl, and to use it as the primary storage component of magical power of the trinket. Many of the most high quality and fashionable necklaces of the High Elven court are made in this way, with the center gem of the necklace containing the pearl, and the rest made of gold and other less magically permeable materials. The second approach is used more with larger objects, such as weapons or armor. As I have already mentioned, yllurian is often alloyed with steel to increase its magical storage capacity, and this yllurian will then be filled with latent magical energy which will reinforce the armor or weapon it is alloyed into, making it even harder to penetrate physically. In rather advanced smithing designs, some of the yllurian is actually left unfilled to absorb the energy of incoming magical attacks, and yet even more skilled armorers are able to rechannel this energy into a counterspell (though this topic can be prohibitively complex for non-experts).   But what of flaming swords? And glowing amulets? How can this latent energy be used to create an active spell without a mage to cast it? To oversimplify the process, the smith imparts into a piece of the enchanted material what is called a spell "signature," that is, the words of power that are used to cast the spell. Researchers discovered long ago that the words of power used to cast spells actually need no speaker to be powerful. In the early days of spellcasting research, arcanists actually had to create a cipher when writing down the words of power, or the spell may be cast on accident by the page! Of course, such a spell would be directionless and generally useless since there is no mage to focus the energy and receive the signals produced by it, but a directionless fireball can still singe your beard! Thus, by writing the signature of a simple "summon fire" spell, an able smith can create a flaming sword, and by also including the signature of a spell to draw power from the river, he can make this sword alight for all time.   Of course, there is much, much more to be said on this topic, and the understanding achieved here is below that of even a novice. However, a more detailed description is currently beyond the scope of this article, so I will leave you with a few final, practical thoughts. For sinks, the easiest, most economical material to use is actually cork -- yes the same type that stops wine bottles so well! Cork is so widely used across our world that it is cheap and accessible to almost everyone, with cork farms that specialize in large orders for mages and other spellcasters. For creating trinkets, the choice of material is not so simple. The intent, size, and durability of the material are all to be considered for a more specialized trinket, and no one material has yet to answer all problems, but the most commonly used materials for enchanted objects are yllurian for weapons and armor, various types of pearls for jewelry, and cut gemstones for various military purposes.