Staff of Venilia

The Staff of Venilia is a lost relic of the Sea Elves. According to legend, the Sea Elves are descended an Elven tribe whose leader, the wise and fair Queen Venilia, devised a plan for her people to find everlasting peace by marching into sea. To do this, her tribe fashioned magical devices capable of a number of feats, most importantly the ability to alter a person's form to adapt to their environment, and the ability to draw in and store a reserve of magical energy, the most powerful of which was presented to her as a symbol of the tribe's trust in her rule.
The Staff was entrusted to Venilia's son, whose name has been lost to time, and disappeared along with him and his entire retinue on the first expedition to the surface lands to collect magical energy - a resource that is plentiful on the surface, but all but non-existent in the Mer. While some believe the staff was destroyed, or lost somewhere in the endless tracks of the sea floor, legend holds that this expedition was ambushed by some band of surface dwellers and the staff was taken as a trophy. Its current whereabouts remain unknown to this day.

Significance

While magical devices with similar powers to the Staff of Venilia are commonplace and indeed critical to the Sea Elves way of life, the Staff itself is regarded as a sacred relic. While the original is lost, the Ladies and Lords of Sea Elven cities bear near-replicas as a symbol of office. All of these symbols bear the same enchantment, and are crafted of a similar white ceramic as the original, each sports a different figure at the top. The original was topped with a small sculpture of a figure with the torso and head of an elven woman and the tail of a fish (an artistic rendition of what the Sea Elves were to become), while the replicas bear symbols emblematic of each city. Were someone to recover the original and return it to the Sea Elves, they would instantly become one of the most well respected individuals in the entire society.