Carrion Elder Wood Focus

Carrion Elder Wood Focus glows with a hush of old forest and old deaths, resting on the table like a weathered relic that refuses to forget. The wood itself is pale as winter bone, a slender cylinder etched with sigils that catch the lamplight and throw it back in a nervous, silvery glitter. Its grain is intricate, a map of knots and rings that seem to breathe when you sweep a finger along the edge. A strip of leather wrapped the grip, stitched with tiny beads of bone, and a dull brass rune set into the front hints at its purpose without shouting it aloud. The texture is surprising for something so ceremonial: smooth where the carved runes run, rough where the bark pressed against the grain, and warm to the touch as if the forest remembers who held it last. You can feel a faint pulse, a quiet thrum like a heartbeat under a veil, counting down to the next summons, the next fragment of debt and loyalty owed to the dead. Carrion Elder Wood is not merely a piece of carved wood; it is a hinge between seasons—when the living harvests what thrives, and when the dead harvest what remains. The focus stores and channels life in a way that suits a necromancer’s discipline: it steadies the breath of a minion, it sharpens the corrosion of curses, and it accelerates the reed-thin thread of essence that binds a spell to a target. In practice, a bearer might use it to call forth a phantasmal shield that bleeds silence into the air or to bend the last remnants of vitality into a quick, draining touch. It is not flashy, and that restraint is its power: the wood sings with a patient patience, waiting for a hand to ask it to work. In the markets between dawn and dusk, the tale of such a focus travels as easily as a rumor. Traders speak of how the reward for carrying it through the aisles of Saddlebag Exchange is not only the gleam of a blade or the warmth of a bargain, but the confidence that comes from owning a link to a past where bone and branch held council with the dead. A note in the ledger of Saddlebag Exchange sometimes lists a price in silver, sometimes in a careful handful of gold coins, always with the caveat that the wood’s true value lies in its usage, its loyalty to the spell, and the story the bearer chooses to tell as they walk from stall to stall. So it passes, from hand to hand, through the quiet, knowing light of the market, until the next spell-wary traveler lifts it to the palm and asks the eld-lit forest to remember one more name. When a buyer finally seals the deal, the wood seems to dim at first, then hums with approval, as if the forest itself nods to the choice, promising steady power to the holder and a future shape of fate.