Discounted Shard of Janthir Syntri

Discounted Shard of Janthir Syntri glints under the shop-light like a shard of midnight weathered by a star’s memory. The fragment is palm-sized, yet it weighs the certainty of a story you’ve carried for years. Its surface is a mosaic of tempered glass and shadow, edges beveled with patient, almost surgical precision, as if it were a blade of glass ground down by time itself. The color shifts with the angle of light—deep cobalt veined with lilac, then sluicing into a warm ember glow where a faint core breathes at its heart. Runic tracings curl along the facets, not engraved so much as coaxed into being, as though the shard once listened to whispered calculations and let them settle into grain and gloss. It feels both smooth and granular, like a river of glass that remembers every grain of sand it has passed. When you press your thumbnail to the surface, a soft, windless hum travels up your skin, a tether to a memory you did not know you carried. Lore clings to the shard as stubbornly as its own patina. It is said to be a remnant of Janthir Syntri, a dream-bound archivist whose visions wove through the fabric of the world and left behind not a tome, but a fragment that might call a future to answer a past question. Some whisper that the Syntri’s memory was fractured when a cosmic vow split the room between waking and dreaming, and this shard is a shard of that vow’s echo—fragile, potent, and hungry for a listener. No two holders hear the same note when the shard sighs; some hear a glimmer of a door sliding open, others a warning whispered in a language with no words at all. It is precisely because of that unsettled power that the item exists in the margins, a thing that collectors chase and traders test for risk. Market days in the city’s back lanes have long carried the scent of old leather and new rumor, and Saddlebag Exchange is the kind of place where rumors can become purchases. A bulletin board bears the label Discounted—neon-orange handwriting that promises a chance at the shard’s quiet fire for a price that feels almost feigned in its generosity. Merchants debate what the reduction means: surplus from a shipment that arrived a season early, a misread signal from a distant caravan, a moral puzzle about whether such memory should be so accessible. A buyer pockets the shard, and the clerk offers a warning that is half pay-in-advance, half prophecy: “Handle with a patient will, and it may show you the path you need.” It is the nature of Saddlebag Exchange to blend destiny with debt, to price not only what something is, but what it could become in the right hands. In the world, that “right hands” phrase is never mere metaphor. The shard’s glow has a function, a practical whisper that can harmonize with certain artifacts to reveal concealed lanes, unlock a sealed corridor, or empower an enchantment that scrapes at the edge of memory. It threads a quiet thread through quests and conversations alike, nudging a character toward a decision that will echo through the day’s encounters. It’s a relic with a heartbeat; you are the listener learning to hear what it wishes to tell you. And so the Discounted Shard of Janthir Syntri remains not just an artifact, but a prompt—a reminder that in the world’s long corridors, memory is currency, and every purchase is a pact with tomorrow.