[6510]

And the high priests guarding the knowledge.

[nevdka]

They perform elaborate cleansing rituals on any item brought into the crystal-writing room. When they enter, they wear special clothing, lest the impurities of the outside world taint the crystals.

[wmertens]

And the scribes designing the incantations using magical tools, ever more complex, eagerly working towards stronger and faster magic crystals

[timschmidt]

Those magical tools being self-referential incantations written in the weird and decidedly non-human language of the crystals themselves, containing deep magic [0] derived from the secrets of life itself [1] exploited to solve problems of intractable complexity in creating the next set of incantations.

Disturbingly, using the magical tool twice on the same incantation never produces exactly the same result.

0: https://www.catb.org/jargon/html/D/deep-magic.html

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_algorithm

[timschmidt]

Ah yes, the sandbenders. [0]

0: http://catb.org/jargon/html/S/sandbender.html