Storm's Eye Rifle

Storm's Eye Rifle rests on the table, its barrel catching the light and snapping it into a narrow arc. The metal is a storm-grey alloy, glazed with a sheen like rain-worn pewter, etched along the receiver with spirals that resemble clouds curling around an eye. The stock is wrapped in worn leather, dark as a thundercloud, the grain of the wood visible where the hide has softened from years of hands curving around it. At the muzzle a faint crackle lingers, as if a hovering bolt had paused long enough to breathe on the world before leaping again. A line of sigils runs from the trigger guard to the rear sight, runes of protection and wind, and when you tilt the rifle you can hear a soft, metallic sigh, the kind that comes when a storm chooses to listen rather than shout. Lorekeepers tell of a smith who heated the metal with thunder, then tempered it in a cavern where rainwater sang in metal pipes, imbuing the rifle with a measured patience, an eye that watches for openings in the clouded air, a tool to coax a target out into the open. In your hands the Storm's Eye feels weight-balanced, not light enough to forget you're carrying a weapon, not so heavy that you stumble through a doorway. It points with a hunter's ease, the stock settling into the shoulder as the arc-light of the sights flickers to life. The first shot hums with a promise, a crackle that travels along the barrel as if a chain of storm beads had been threaded through the metal. The second, if you time it right, feels like a gust bending the wind itself: precise, methodical, and inevitable. In skirmishes it becomes less a tool of destruction and more a conductor, guiding the air to find the soft spots in armor, to peel away the hesitation in a foe's step. The rifle thrives when you pair it with foresight—an scout's patience, an engineer's quick fingers, and a moment of weather-watching calm that lets you read the battlefield as if it were a map drawn in rain. The world around it burbles with stories of barter and authority. A hunter once traded a crate of sea-glass beads and a tale about a storm that refused to break, and a dealer whispered that the price hovered around the high ledger of Saddlebag Exchange, where sturdy traders keep their fingers on the pulse of value and risk. People haggle with a nod and a smile, slipping glimmering shells and weathered coins across a scarred counter, and the Storm's Eye travels from hand to hand only when the moment itself seems to demand it. It is not merely a rifle; it is a rumor of skies, a promise kept between rain and arrow, a tool that makes the world's weather feel a little more graspable to those who know how to listen. Perhaps tomorrow a storm will test it again, and the rifle will answer, in kind.