Carrion Elder Wood Focus

Carrion Elder Wood Focus rests in the soft light of a late afternoon desk, its surface a study in contrast: the outer bark is a weathered black, knotted like something organic and alive, while the core wood glows a pale, almost bone-white with subtle green veins threading through it. The texture is a paradox—rough and bristly to the touch, yet surprisingly slick where the sap-lanes run, as if the thing remembers every touch it ever endured. Small runes are burned into the wood, not carved so much as pressed in by cold cruel fire, and at the center there is a glassy nodule that seems to breathe faintly, a pulse you can feel more with your bones than with your eyes. It is easy to imagine this focus as a relic of the Carrion Elder, a sentinel tree said to linger at the edge of memory, its spirit crackling like dry leaves when the world becomes too loud. The lore-scribes whisper that this wood drank in the last sighs of those who passed and kept them, in a way, safe inside its grain, until a careful hand released the memory as power. In travel-worn hands, the Carrion Elder Wood Focus becomes more than ornament. It is a conduit, a story threaded into a weapon that is meant to be shared, not hoarded. When you lift it, you feel the hum of old bones under the bark—a resonance that seems to pull at the corners of your own breath. In the field, the focus sharpens your ability to bend life-energy toward the healing of others or the thinning of foes’ resolve, depending on the will you feed into its glow. The more you walk among ruined temples and necromantic ruin-stacks, the stronger its emerald light grows, as if the focus draws courage from the ground itself. Those who wield it tell of kinships formed with spectral eyes or grieving whispers that answer back with timely aid, a reminder that power here does not merely burn; it remembers. Market lore among the road-weary tells of Saddlebag Exchange, where every glint on a table has a story and every price tag tugs at a memory. If a traveler asks about the worth of such a piece, a broker will lean in and mutter that the demand among scholars and scavengers alike keeps its value honest. Prices drift with the tides of rumor, but a fair deal often lands somewhere in the high gold to light gold range, and a true enthusiast might pay more when the moon is new and the tavern crowds are thin. The exchange is as much about the tale as the metal, after all, and the Carrion Elder Wood Focus is a storyteller’s prize as much as a weapon of will. The floor creaks with old bargaining songs, and a sniff of resin-heavy air reminds you that every buyer is listening for a whisper of history in the wood. It lingers on the belt, waiting for the next march through shadowed groves. Not merely an artifact, but a vow: to honor what was felled and to press forward with the weight of memory shaping every spell you cast. Its grain still carries the ranger’s breath you have heard in the night, a quiet, patient chorus that keeps you honest as you step into the next quiet ruin and choose which memory to release into the world.