Track 20: The Bloodied Lord

Track 20: The Bloodied Lord sits in your palm like a relic retrieved from a storm—a compact disk of dark, gleaming basalt tipped with a rim of worn brass. The surface is slick, almost oily to the touch, with specks of red that catch the lamp light and refuse to wash away, as if the track itself bears a whisper of a battlefield. Around the edge runs a fine groove, clean and precise, and within that groove a miniature panorama is etched in coppery filigree: a throne room, banners torn along the seams, a lone figure seated with a gaze that seems to follow you. The label, if you can call it a label, is a scuffed brass plate pressed into the rim with the words Track 20: The Bloodied Lord stamped in a hand that looks older than the iron keys on your belt. When you tilt it, a tiny thump answers back, a heartbeat you can almost hear through the metal, as if the track itself were listening for a caller. Lore threads coil around this item like a smoke circle from a burnt map. They say the Bloodied Lord was a ruler who bled both his enemies and his mercy from a city that never slept, a tyrant whose rhetoric bled into stone until the walls finally remembered to resist. To those who held the original disc, the track carried not music alone but a confession—snatches of a verdict delivered in a hall of mirrors, where every accusation echoed in repetition and every favor was paid with a scar. The Bloodied Lord could be chained to memory by a single record, and in the right hands, Track 20 unseals a fragment of that old world: the throne, the debt, the consequence written in the red ink of history. In the game world, this track has a stubborn way of showing you what memory costs. When unearthed during exploration or tucked into a quest chain, it can unlock a voice-recording that reveals the lord’s last negotiations with a faction that sought to bind him to a treaty against his own people. Inspecting the disc can trigger a sequence where you trace the lord’s final steps through a decayed map—a breadcrumb trail that leads to a ruined plaza, or perhaps to a crypt beneath a collapsed aqueduct. It’s less a weapon and more a key: a narrative hinge that turns a silent relic into a doorway for new lore, new dialogue options, and a handful of small, meaningful choices that ripple outward into the world’s current events. The market for Track 20 is a strange thing, and Saddlebag Exchange makes it feel almost like a rumor you can trade. I watched a veteran trader shoulder a creaking chest and lay out a parchment listing, the price scrawled in careful copper. The going rate hovered around a handful of gold, with whispers that truly rare copies fetch more from collectors who crave not power, but provenance. We traded stories as much as coin, the kind of negotiation that makes shelves heavy with other tracks seem light as air. A buyer might pay in rare cloth maps, or in a tribute of incense and old ledger pages, and the exchange would barter back with a bundle of potential futures—the kind of futures Track 20 promises if you’re patient enough to listen. So the Bloodied Lord’s track remains, not merely a thing you own but a doorway you step through—into memory, into a moment where power and consequence collide, and where a single, stubborn disc keeps asking you to listen a little longer.