Something's staring back at you from this orb. There's no eyes, but you can feel it, like someone starting at you from a dark corner of a bar. There's a flash as a shield spell flares to life and fades. Occasionally, that happens again. Approaching it puts that shield up visibly, a shimmering barrier that protects it from mundane interaction. To the layperson, that's all they ever get from this.

To the magically educated, this device is far more.

A basic grasp of spellcraft shows that this is meant for containing something, and that the Shield spell is part of that. There don't appear to be any wards keeping the contained thing in, inferring this is a voluntary containment. It looks very fragile and complex, an object of importance to those who made it, with little that's ornamental about it.

An educated grasp of spellcraft yields that this object is taking in power from the Weave around it, the same as any living being would. The power is being processed into evocational energies, ceaselessly, and the Shield spell is pulling the power from the spells, using that energy as it's source. The process is ceaseless, without further pattern to it. There's been a lot of effort put into making this an efficient process that doesn't make it a beacon for anything with magical senses.

An advanced grasp of spellcraft reveals this is a mind-support system, meant to allow a purely mental entity to exist without a body, alive without physical form. Parts of this support can be used to identify the mind they're taken from, identifying itself as The Eldest Flameborn. The entity is what's changing the Power into evocational energies, vestigal Fireballs and Meteor Storms, Darkness and Thunderclaps. This is on such a small scale that it's easily overcome by the repeated Shield spell.

Mastery of spellcraft would confirm this was made by several authors, masters working together to create this work of magical art, beautiful in it's complexity and efficiency. The full story revealed: A vestigal mind, draconic in nature, was pulled from another's mind voluntarily, and given the ability to constantly process magic. This leaves the vestigal mind in a state of bliss and fulfillment, it's original purpose and directive to pressure a Flameborn to constantly use their evocational magic.

There's a danger in long-term storage of a magical entity is: buildup of energy, so this spellform also uses divination means to evaluate the total amount of energy contained therein. When total energy levels exceed the override parameter, an expulsion of energy in the form of a standard shield spellform occurs, draining and dissipating the energy. A possibility that the magical entity may be able to hold back the residual energy until it can release it all at once was taken into account.  A cascading override was added to give the total energy numerous places to dissipate (similar to a stacked set of sieves).

Finally, this entity can be communicated with by those skilled with entering the minds of others. They cannot properly go into this mind, as the natural accesses for that aren't present in it's vestigal form, but they can enter a mindscape where they can interact with it. It is violent, delights in mutilation, and is fascinated by what fire does to flesh.

With this degree of skill, the True Name of the mind that this madness came from is revealed: Angela Amana.