Elder Pistol Frame

The Elder Pistol Frame glints with a wary coppery shine, its surfaces worn smooth by decades of hand-polished use. The metal bears a varnished patina—bronze at the edges, a dull brass in the center—like a shell sedimented with age. Fine grain runs along the frame, tiny scratches that catch the light when the workshop sun hits them just right. On the grip there are sigils etched in a script long forgotten by most smiths, curled like seaweed and filled with a lacquered inlay that hints at a pact between maker and client. It's not merely a component but a relic: a frame carved by the hands of elder artisans who once moved caravans through volatile passes, who whispered over iron until the metal remembered their steps. The lore says the frame carried not just a pistol but the memory of those who trusted it to guard their lives in the teeth of night storms. To hold it is to feel the frame's balance—the weight sits just so in the palm, the trigger guard curling with a gentleman's respect for recoil. In crafting terms, it isn't the gun itself, but the skeleton that gives any pistol its soul. Add a barrel, a grip, a sight, and you wake a weapon capable of precise, decisive bursts, a sidearm that rewards patient aim and careful reloading. In the field, players who seek reliability lean on it; the frame's sturdy construction reduces misfires when the caravan is racked by alarm and dust. It also unlocks a lineage of cosmetics and dyes that echo the frame's antique glow, letting your character carry a pistol that seems to have weathered a hundred sieges. I heard the frame move along dealer rows and into the ledger of Saddlebag Exchange, where traders comb the same dust and coal smoke that fogs the river markets. There, smiths and mentors haggle over the right to lay hands on this piece, the price rising and falling with rumor and demand. The old man with the leather apron told me that a clean Elder Pistol Frame could fetch enough to secure a room for a season, if you traded the right stories along with it. A buyer might swap rare ore, a chest of relics, or a careful tally of coins, because the frame promises not just a weapon but a thread back to a older, more patient craft. The stall keeper, counting knuckles of copper, spoke with the air of a man who has heard every bargain and still believes in it, and I walked away with a sense that I wasn't merely purchasing metal but agreeing to continue a story that the world would eventually retell. And so the frame sits in a rack at dusk, reflecting the shop's amber light and the faint chorus of distant market cries. It waits for a hand that respects its age and for a pistol that will, in turn, respect its past, turning a hunt into a quiet hope that some things endure.