Golden Conduits

A Golden Conduit was any relic from the ancient Gold Elvish civilisation which gave its user the ability to wield magic, regardless of whether they were a race which could innately wield magic or not. They were frequently used by the kings of Chalparna, mostly for military purposes. In combination with the powerful Constructs of the Golden Legion, the Golden Conduits enabled the fractured kings of the region to ward off invasions from their powerful and greedy neighbours; even the Dragons who ruled Roulonne and the Sand Elves in Kalzuranur with their powerful magic and vast Human legions knew better than to risk provoking those who wielded the power of the Gold Elves.

A Golden Conduit could take several forms, but they were most commonly either staffs or swords - which, despite the name, were not necessarily golden. Simply holding the Conduit would enable one to use it, as the object would connect with the mind of its wielder, but some kings apparently found a method of bonding a Conduit to themselves to ensure that nobody else could use its power. How they did this is unknown, and some historians suspect that it may not have been true at all, but rather a lie invented by the kings to discourage anyone from attempting to steal their Conduits.

Conduits could be used to wield several types of magic, most commonly plasma and shield magic, but some were also capable of healing magic, and a few - the rarest, most valuable and most aggressively and violently sought after - could wield a type of magic known as light magic, which appears to be unique to these relics and has never been reported elsewhere. Light magic had the apperance of painfully bright rays of light, hence the name. Light magic, like plasma magic, mostly dealt damage through extreme heat, but it appeared to have some degree of physical force as well, and it tended to be more focussed and concentrated than the sometimes erratic nature of plasma bolts.

Use of the Golden Conduits was not free, as they all required magical energy to use, stored within a slightly blue-tinted crystal embedded within each Conduit. The magical energy stored within the crystal would make it sparkle and glow, providing an easy method of reading how far the storage was depleted, as the glow would become dimmer as the crystal lost charge. A race which naturally wielded magic, such as the Gold Elves themselves, could use their own magic to charge the Conduit, but the Chalparnis had to find another source. The magical energy stored within Worldpeak Mountain in Epsilucia was apparently capable of recharging a Conduit, but going there to recharge a Conduit every time was simply infeasible, so the Chalparni kings turned to the method of magical vampirism (also known as magical parasitism, to avoid confusion with actual vampirism), using the life-essence of others to charge the crystals, which could either be from prisoners condemned to death, slaves who were past their usefulness, or foes on the battlefield. Since the Golden Conduits had the ability to draw out the life-essence of those killed near it - as long as their wielder willed that the essence be absorbed - it is presumed that the Gold Elves themselves did occasionally use this method to recharge the crystal, if they were growing tired and could no longer sustain its charge with their own power.

The Golden Conduits ceased to function in the 12th-13th century as magic disappeared from the world, but most of them did briefly work once again during the magical revival of the Civil War.