Stick of Butter

Stick of Butter rests on the rough oak counter, a sun-gleaming bar wrapped in brittle parchment sleeve. Its surface is pale yellow, almost lunar, with a sheen that catches the lantern flame and makes the room smell faintly of toast and brine. The texture invites touch: when you rub it between your fingers, it yields with a sigh, a micro-terrace of melted detail that threatens to puddle into a neat, buttery pool. A tiny rune, etched in old script along the waxy edge, glows faintly when the room's siphons and sigils hum with latent energy. Lore says it was churned atop a sun-warmed hillside by a baker who fled a siege, who swore the butter carried the memory of a convoy’s wheels and the promise of safe passage. In the right hands, it becomes more than a snack; it’s a talisman for travelers, a reminder that even in hardship, ordinary sustenance can hold up the world. In game-world terms it’s a strange little artifact: edible, yet inert in the sense that it can be tossed into a campfire to scent a camp with savory steam, or melted down to grease gears of a contraption, or offered to a starving scout for favors owed. Some merchants swear by it as a social tool, a prop in negotiations as much as a morsel of nourishment. You’ll hear the butter-tongue chatter of traders as they describe how a Stick of Butter can, with the right barter, loosen a clamp on a locked chest or grease a deal that would otherwise jam in the gears of a market. The item’s presence threads through the world’s fabric because it’s part of a larger ritual economy. Bakers prize it for the memory it carries; caravanners hoard it for what it can unlock when a campfire is your only shield against frost. It’s not just a snack but a seed of exchange—a symbol of hospitality that opens doors to stories as surely as it opens lids to pots. In the taverns, nights stretch with the clink of coins and the hum of whispers about who paid whom and when. If you linger long enough and listen for the half-remembered phrases, you’ll hear someone cite the Stick of Butter as the reason a guild’s courier found safe passage around a flooded pass. And yes, the market sees it, too. You’ll find it at the Saddlebag Exchange, where battered leather stalls spill out into the street and the scent of fresh bread competes with the iron tang of coins. A stick of butter might fetch a modest price—two copper for a quick nibble, or a few silver if a negotiator wants something more—yet every trade carries a paragraph of history. People don’t just buy the item; they buy a line of memory, a page in the region’s ongoing ledger of luck and loss. And so the Stick of Butter travels on, a glossy beacon in a world built of pact and peril, warming bodies and conversations wherever it lands.