Sinister Scavenged Obsidian Torch

Sinister Scavenged Obsidian Torch sits on the desk, a slender column of midnight glass carved from a ruin's blackened heart and cooled with patient care. Its surface is satin-dark, absorbing the guttering lamplight and returning it as faint green eyes along the fluted edges. The wick-hole is threaded with copper veins that once carried the first spark, and the base bears a scorch-marked sigil of the scavengers who pried it free from a collapsed shrine. If you press your thumb along the tapering lip, you can feel the years in the burnished rock, as if the obsidian remembers every hand that carved, cursed, or blessed it. The torch’s glow is not bright, but it is stubborn, a greenish ember that refuses to die even when the room cools to silence. When you light it, the flame flickers with a patient whisper, and the runes along the shaft glow in a slow, watchful green, as if the stone is listening to your breath. In the field, this torch is more than a thing to illuminate a cave or a ruined outpost. Its sinister aura seems to tug at the edges of perception, drawing out hidden doorways and faint glyphs that vanish the moment you blink. It’s said the obsidian shard once belonged to a shrine dedicated to a star-ward order, and that the scavengers—those quick-handed tinkerers who haunt market lanes—took it not for warmth but for memory. The torch becomes a part of a larger story when you walk the night markets and hear traders whisper that light with a mind of its own can betray you to a secret you weren’t meant to see. People pass it from hand to hand not just for its warmth but for a chance to glimpse a corridor that only the brave or the tired would ever notice. Market days make the torch talk, too, in a way. At Saddlebag Exchange, a copper-voiced vendor will tell you the same thing you read in the runes: its price moves with the moonlike tides of demand, rising when a run of explorers returns with new maps and falling when a lull settles over the taverns. A patient buyer can snag it for a few gold pieces; a sharper trade, for a bright morning's bustle, might push it to a handful of gold. People don’t hoard it for its flame alone but for the lore threaded through its smoke—the chance to chase a hidden floor, to feel the past lean close, and to carry a spark that refuses to surrender to the dark. Sometimes its glow lingers after you set the torch down, a reminder that light in this world travels with the one who carries it. In quiet moments between skirmishes, storytellers trade rumors about the torch’s owner and its resting place.