Recipe: Extended Potion of Ghost Slaying

Recipe: Extended Potion of Ghost Slaying is a brittle parchment, its edges curled and singed as if a candle’s memory burned into the fiber. The title is written in pale blue ink that shivers like a wisp of ectoplasm, and a thin seal of wax, fractured in places, holds a thread of saffron dye that glimmers when the lamp catches it just so. The texture tells a story: grainy with age, yet oddly slick where the oils of long-vanished herbs have bled into the paper, and the scent—lilac, resin, and a ghost-soft tang of smoke—lingers on the fingertip. On the back death-gray sigils crowd the margins, a map of runes that never quite align, as if the page itself were learning to drift away from the world it describes. This is not merely a recipe; it is a hinge between a man’s work and a specter’s memory, a doorway painted with ink to guide someone who would walk through it. The lore tucked into the margins makes the parchment feel heavier in the palm. It is said the recipe was copied in the glow of lanterns by apprentices who learned from scholars of the Durmand file and the Vigil, then tempered by a siege where the living and the dead shared the same breath of winter. The potion it teaches is pitched not as brute force but as time itself—an elixir that extends the moment in which a fighter can stand against a specter, allowing blows to land with steadier hands, and granting the user a longer window to anticipate a wraith’s counterstroke. The extended version grew from a monastery’s collapse, when a healer realized that if you slow the wind between heartbeats you might hear the story a ghost longs to tell before fading into the room’s cold quiet. There, the elixir earned its name not from noise but from patience, a patient patience that makes a brave soul more precise, more deliberate, more likely to end a haunting not with anger but with mercy. In the world where I’ve traded stories for weathered coins, this parchment feels almost ceremonial, a bridge between field and bench, between myth and method. It is the kind of item that players carry as part of a larger tale, because its use—brewed and applied—changes a fight that isn’t just about health bars, but about the roomful of echoes that haunt a corridor after dusk. And the market, too, has its chorus of gears and voices. I found it first in the shadowed aisles near the Saddlebag Exchange, where the talk is as much about who slept on whose couch as about what treasures are traded. The clerk’s finger hovered over the price and settled on a modest sum, a few silver that felt right for an old page with a new destiny. They spoke of demand, of ghost-hunting expeditions and quiet hauntings, and I listened as if the parchment spoke back, promising that every brew would write a different ending for the story these walls have been telling since long before I arrived.