Relic of the Sunless

Relic of the Sunless rests in my hand—a disk of obsidian-black metal, roughly palm-sized, its surface polished to a quiet mirror that refuses to reflect anything but its own shadow. The rim is beveled with delicate, almost musical grooves, and the center bears a spiral of sigils that vanish and reappear like a breath. It is cool to the touch, cooler still when the wind carries salt and iron from the coast, as if the relic were a seed of night kept in a pocket of daylight. When you cradle it, you can feel a faint tremor, as if the metal remembers a sun long extinguished. The lore around it is a wind-scuffed tale: a relic forged by a forgotten order—the Sunless—who swore to guard a light they believed could outlive the stars. They carved the sun’s symbol into the material they thought could hold it, then sealed their rites within that glossy disk, so that their vigil might outlast their world. In the field, the Sunless relic is not merely ornament. Its glow answers the needs of explorers who press into ruins where light has been banished by decay and time. When activated, the disk emits a narrow beam of cool, pale light that carves a path through darkness, revealing hidden runes etched into stone and revealing faint glyphs that would otherwise vanish beneath years of dust. It can be attuned to unlock a sealed door or gate, a ritual door that requires a quiet moment and a patient hand to coax its mechanism into life. More than that, the relic stores a momentary surge of vitality—a burst of luminescent energy that can bolster a party’s endurance for a short spell, turning a tense corridor into a doorway of possibility. The practical uses are clear: light in the black, deciphering in the murk, and a beacon when the way forward seems to vanish. Yet the relic’s true weight lies in the stories it invites—about the sun’s disappearance, about guardians who chose to keep faith when others chose to run, about the stubborn optimism that a single spark could still matter. Prices drift like the wind around a coastal bazaar, and the Saddlebag Exchange is the kind of place where those winds swap hands as quickly as tales. I watched a clerk weigh the relic in the palm of his gloved hand, counting coins as if the disk could sing a price back to him. The chatter around the counter suggested a value in gold, a range shaped by the relic’s condition and the certainty of its lore: a couple of gold at the low end, more when a known scholar or seasoned scavenger swore they could feel the Sunless’s breath in the sigils. Traders traded stories as fast as they traded coins, and I walked away with a sense that the Relic of the Sunless was less a bargain than a bridge—between a sun that never rose and the hands that still believed in its memory. As I tucked it away, the disk gave a last, barely perceptible pulse, half lullaby, half warning. The world beyond the ruin kept its own pace, but the relic, patient as a tide, reminded me that some lights endure not because they burn bright, but because they refuse to fade.