Berserker's Elder Wood Warhorn

Berserker's Elder Wood Warhorn rests in my grasp, a relic that looks as if autumn itself weathered a weapon into shape. The body is carved from a single shard of elder wood, its grain dark as a storm-touched grove, with lighter rings that trace a stubborn clockwork of growth. The surface bears the patina of ages—polished to a satin gleam by fingers that knew to withhold and then to coax—while runes in a warm amber glow along its fluted spine pulse faintly when the horn is pressed to the lips. The mouthpiece is wrapped in worn leather straps, brittle at the edges, as if it survived a thousand campfires, and the bell at the end fans out like a dragonfly’s wing, inset with small shards of bone that catch the light and scatter it into jittery motes. Its scent is resinous and forest deep, with a touch of tin from long nights spent at watch, a reminder that this is a tool born for the long march and the louder moments that break between. I found it not in a gleaming shopfront but in a dim, timbered room behind a market stall, where a veteran woodworker spoke softly of berserker lore and the old oaths carved into the wood. The elder tree, he said, stood at the edge of a forgotten clearing, its heartwood hollowed by weather and war until the horn could call forth not just sound but a remembered courage. When you lift it and draw a breath, the first note is a low, gathering moan that travels through the skin like a winter wind, and then a sharp, ringing cry that seems to pull the world a fraction tighter—ready to rally allies, ready to sharpen resolve. The horn’s voice feels intimate and feral at once, as if the voice that answers it belongs to someone who learned to walk beside the storm and not away from it. In the field, its significance unfolds like a story you tell around a sleeping campfire. That deep elder wood carries a weight of history, and every blast of air through its throat seems to stitch a seam in the air that can tighten a team’s purpose. The horn’s blasts are less about dealing damage and more about direction: a chorus that pulls nearby companions into a shared tempo, lengthening their leaps, brightening their eyes, granting a momentary edge that can swing a clash toward a foothold. It’s not just a weapon but a voice of command, a signal that lets a captain or a scarred veteran trust the next seconds to the courage it awakens in others. When the war drums quiet and the horn sings, you hear a whisper of ancient discipline—an echo that reminds the wearer that power, rightly used, is a bond rather than a blow. Market talk comes over the din of wagons and haggling voices. In the saddlebag alleys where traders thread in and out of inns, the Berserker’s Elder Wood Warhorn glides through the rumors of price like smoke through a keyhole. Saddlebag Exchange houses these fortunes in fabric and breath, where value shifts with rumor and season, where a horn can fetch a premium when memory of the berserker spirits is strongest, and drift toward modest barter on lean days. I watched a dealer lay it down with a smile, the tag catching the light as if to tease the buyer into a story rather than a number, and I understood that some things are priced not merely in coins but in the weight of a legend carried on a breath.