Legend of the Tawar Crystals

The Source
This is the retelling of the Legend of the Tawar Crystals as retold by Asaekai, as she remembers it from her childhood. This was shared at a storytelling event within Ern'echad.

The Legend
As is the way of legends, this story is many ages old and only fragments of the truth have survived. But I shall tell you all I know of the green Tawar Crystals, glowing softly in the shadow of the mother tree Tinnu Yrn.

The story begins when the Tawar'Tinnu Nost was still young, Tinnu Yrn's many children still reaching to approach their now great size. In those days, the Foundling races were still walking within Incantre far more often than they do now. The Urathear had called them home, but not all had gone. The younger races, still finding their way and becoming peoples, tribes, and cultures in their own rights, were not made to exist beside the raw forces the Foundlings embodied.

The gods themselves would come and walk the lands, or so the stories say, in those early days of life. They would leave their marks upon the mortal world in ways that would outlast the eons. The Tawar Crystals are one of these marks. I have heard it told that Ryaus planted them when he planted Tinnu Yrn; they grew first as crystal fruit from the branches sprouting from his body. He planted their seeds, and the Tawar Crystals came up out of the soil, for a time pacing the mother tree as she spread her first roots.

As Tinnu Yrn grew tall enough to cast her shadow and began letting the seeds that would become her children fall to the earth, the crystals began to glow in verdant hues which gave a light beneath her spreading branches which could nurture the growing saplings. And as the great tree grew ever taller, birthing her children with a promise to someday match her height, her amazing stature began to draw the attentions of remaining Foundlings. Their curiosity brought them to see the tender young forest planted by the Urathear, and they did not - or, perhaps they did - know that their presence would bring destruction.

The forest drew in other life, not just the powerful first created races of the Urathear. And as tender as the stretching branches of the saplings towards the sun, their bodies were not made to withstand the forces coming among the trees. Barely rooted, their home was already threatened. Here the story deviates; some tellings say it was a tribe of Nostrian elves, others say fae kin forming a circle, and there are even tales that it was a single shaman. But someone found a way to harness the gift of the crystals Ryaus had so wisely planted within the forest.

Of course, the story that it was the fae who were able to tap the fruit of the Urathear was a favorite to be heard when I was a child. But I cannot say with certainty that this is so. No matter which version, however, there are several things on which all agree: the growing crystals were not as we find them now, but scattered throughout the forest and arranged so that they could be harnessed; the oldest trees who still whisper to those who know to listen recall a day of song reverberating through the air, a day in the night of bright green light and a sky turned emerald. The ways of the Tawar Crystals are lost to us, but the gift of their magic was enough to keep the forces of the elementals, the Primarchs, and the dragons at bay so that Tawar'Tinnu Nost could thrive.

There are no other tales of the Tawar Crystals performing as they did in legend, and yet they still hold a secret power. They still glow in the shadows of the forest with a warmth not of the sun. And it is strongly believed that that residual power is why, through the Draconic Encroachment, although all she sheltered fled who were able, Tinnu Yrn and her children still stand, and the forest has in only a few hundred years grown almost to its former, almost forgotten glory from before... A bittersweet tale. The forest lived, though many did not, so that we may return and thrive once more, gods willing.