* * *
Maliar glared at the crystal lying on its wrapping. It gleamed against the undyed wool, utterly and completely inert. It didn't even possess the properties of a normal crystal, much less the unassociated power that drew her to it in the first place. Even that unforgettable stain the crystal had absorbed from the dark cave was gone.
It was empty. Nothing, nothing at all more could be learned from it.
The brown-haired elf reached for a sheet of parchment. She needed more of these crystals to study, but she couldn't afford to trust the 'alliance' right now. Inese's poisoning unsettled her. The mad Celt had stabbed her, certainly, but no one at all knew who poisoned her. Until Tombiree's proposed conspiracy was discovered or proven false, Maliar could not risk involving her... allies.
Cirig, then. The firbolg still owed her a debt for his freedom. In fact, if she diced well, he would owe her forever.
She dipped her scarab feather quill in ink and began to write. A simple request for his aid on a venture into the mushroom forest. As she wrote, her mind wandered back to the inert crystal.
Aligning a crystal traditionally focussed powers already inherent along one specific path. Putting your own power into an object was frowned upon among enchanters. It was sloppy and dangerous. All enchanters learned the skills to avoid such risks, and the ones who pursued enchantments as she had disdained the thought of it. Let eldritches and mentalists create magical items by putting their own power into any old object.
The real danger, the one that enchanters liked to keep to themselves (for the first enchanters were elves, and elves adored secrets), was that the link between such an object and the creator's power never faded. If she imbued the crystal and it fell into the wrong hands, they could siphon off her power or use it as an in-road into her defenses. That could not be permitted.
Perhaps she could find whatever oddity caused the power to leak away from the crystal and deal with it. A properly aligned crystal would work much better than carving the matrix onto shar horns.