When Callum crushes the moon opal, it glows and pulsates in his hand, but when Runaan crushed his, it merely turned to fine powder. What accounts for that difference?
Hey fam, I’ve thought about this too, and I’m not 100% settled on any one explanation, but let me take a stab at it.
When Callum crushed Ethari’s pendant, he used that same hand to draw the Historia Viventem spell. You can see the magic trailing off his finger here. Primal spells are kind of like magical spray paint you can draw in midair.
That power dripping from his fingers, we’ve seen that before, too.
So I’m guessing that that’s how it goes when you have an abundance of primal magic--it might spill a bit.
Runaan’s hand doesn’t drip any magic at all. Mystica Arbora might be in a different category than Callum’s Historia Viventem. It could be a different kind of ability, or a different kind of spell. Or maybe it was just shown that way for dramatic effect.
We still don’t know a lot about Moonshadow magic: spells vs innate abilities. We know Runaan’s not a mage, so he needed the power locked inside the pendant to create the Mystica Arbora effect because he couldn’t access the Moon since it was down. But I always got the impression from the official response on the topic that if the Moon had been above the horizon for him to access, he could’ve pulled off Mystica Arbora without spending Ethari’s gift. Which makes me think that maybe such concealment skills are more of an inherent ability than they are spellcraft. I mean, these are the same elves who just up and hide whole villages as a preference. Do they really need a mage for that? Or is it more like a community dance they can just do together, which hides the village because of their collective magical strength with concealment? The spell Callum does is basically a truth spell, but the one Runaan uses is for concealment, which is how their invisibility works too.
I took a look at their hands, as well. Here’s Callum’s hand when he crushes the pendant. It has more light than Runaan’s. Stylistic differences, maybe, between S1 and S3? Or maybe this light is just more visible because Callum’s in a dim cavern.
Also of note, though: Callum holds that crushed pendant for a second before he draws the rune. Probably to let us see that yeah, Callum’s totally got a handful of Moon magic now, even though he doesn’t have the Moon arcanum.
Runaan has no time to dawdle, though. He just cracks that thing open and goes straight into spreading it through the air.
Perhaps as a result of his speed, the glow from the pendant doesn’t kick in until he’s already tossed its fragments into the air.
But when it does kick in, it’s the same color as Callum’s: that pale turquoise. Also, his whole head is glowing, like he’s the first one to morph into an illusion tree, which is kinda hilarious but also makes sense. He’s in control of the spell effect, and he wants to spread it to everyone around him. The pendant allows him to generate the illusion, but it also functions as a boost to Runaan’s area of effect, allowing him to extend the spell as far as he can throw the moon opal dust.
Or maybe when a Moonshadow crushes a moon opal pendant, there’s no big visible release of Moon magic because it gets absorbed into the elf in question, and then released into the spell through them. Which Callum can’t do yet.
To tl;dr, I’d say it’s either a matter of stylistic choice in S1 vs S3, or Runaan’s just faster and in broad daylight, or there’s some actual worldbuilding detail we don’t know yet about Moon magic. I’m leaning toward “it’s just prettier for each character the way they did it,” though.
