Flùrdubh

"Eòrna had a fourth of her field blackened by the còn arbhair, ya heard?" The man was somewhat discontent about this fact.

"The lucky lass... Gonna get 'er all stocked up for winter."

— Two envious men chatting

Description

Flùrdubh is a dark flour prepared from Còn arbhair — the mushroom infected grains, which possess some affinity to the Æter and with a peculiar effect of crystallizing the chaos into a multitude of concepts and forms when maturing. That property is utilized by skalds from many schools, not only the Tamers of Æter for training purposes. While the product may resemble the flour used specifically for bread and pastry, it is used equally often a a source of concepts for further refinement.

Grain selection — flour type

The finest choice of Còn arbhair is selected for further processing. Now usually in this stage the cones will be broken in half and separated into four distinct categories, based on the color and intensity as revealed in the cross-section. The depth of black determines the quality of the flour with the best being black. That on the other hand has led to some naming conventions:

1. deas (nickname: morning) — mostly white, lowest quality
2. feasgar (nickname: afternoon) — with a tinge of grey
3. feasdorcha (nicknamed: evening) — with a strong diffuse layer of dark grey and a black crust
4. madhoiche (nicknamed: midnight) — mostly black, but a greyish center is tolerable

Milling — name the grade

After short drying the Còn arbhair are milled. Typically for a fine flour one would repeat the process at least 5 times, with the finest flour reaching 7 rounds. From this comes the common naming tradition, i.e., a one, three, five or seven would mean a flour which was milled once, thrice, and so on. In everyday language one speaks of grades rather than milling rounds, and so grade five deas, would simply be a low quality fine ground flùrdubh, while grade seven midnight, would refer to a premium grade black flùrdubh. The coarsity of it would be lower for the higher number and of course the finest flour is the most expensive.

Most of the time grade translates to cost, but not always. There were times, when midnight grade was so abundant that the demand was filled for several months. Due to degradation and diffussion of the concepts, the overstocked high grade flours lost most of their properties, while the low grade ones retained some, and enough to return at least a some of the costs.

Sifting

While milling does most of the job, sifting is what makes the flour grains even and thus easier to use for bread and pastry. As fine sifts are not common, many resort to using the blue lotus silk, hardened to a metal-like state by Lotus harvesters. That one is made for high quality grade seven flour. Commoners would use a nettle cloth with thicker threads. In bigger cities, particularly in the city of Halen, merchants will use sieves with a metallic mesh with a fixed number of openings per area. This is theoretically to maintain a standard over the stocked goods, though some speculate the procedure was introduced to cut down smuggling things inside the flour. The sifted flour would be sealed by the person responsible for the process and one could temporarily lose their right to sell the produce, should the seal on it be broken.

Usage

Pastry

Flùrdubh pastry by Adél Grőber (edited by Angantyr)

Generally flùrdubh is very potent and not used on its own, however exceptions are made for the white varieties and leftovers from the concept purification. In each case the resulting pastry will have little to no effect on the consumer's mind, not enough to make one lose their mind in the numerous abundence of concepts. The concentration of crystallized concepts will be high enough to induce a short-lasting dream-like afterthought. Flùrdubh was thus found useful not only for the skalds to find inspiration, but also more widely as a base for leisure-type pastry. At times, low-processed dark varieties would be mixed with honey and made into a crunch.

Concept source

Second to their use as a pastry ingredient, flùrdubh is used as an excellent source of crystallized concepts. The process is efficient with varieties of at least evening quality and requires a solvent with Ætereal affinity. Crystallized concepts undergo dissolution followed by the slight bleeching of the powder. One must avoid overheating, which would burn the grain and thus sever the concepts' ties of the concepts to the Material Plane, causing them to disappear before the solvent could encapsulate them.

Concept distillation by marsupium photography (edited by Angantyr)