Carrion Banded Gauntlets of the Citadel

Carrion Banded Gauntlets of the Citadel wrap around the forearms in a strange, deliberate embrace: leather as dark as a moonless night, stitched with sinew-thin threads, and etched with bone-white sigils that catch the light as if they’re breathing. The metal bands—iron and aged brass—bite into the skin with a quiet, ceremonial pressure, each segment bearing the telltale groove of battle-worn use. Inside, the lining smells faintly of rain, carrion, and old calculations, as though the wearer has picked up a grim arithmetic of life and death simply by slipping them on. The texture is at once rough and intimate—velvet-dark fingers of hide over bone filaments, a whisper of rust on the edges of the plates, and tips of the gauntlets that shimmer with a lacquered sheen like dried ink on a map of peril. Lore has it that these gloves were hammered in the Citadel’s underhalls, where necromancers weighed destinies with bone beads and measured loyalties in shards of obsidian glass. They were meant for hands that would command order from chaos, for grip that could pin a moment in time long enough to bend it to the wielder’s purpose. In the heat of battle, the gauntlets feel less like armor and more like a second skin—an extension of resolve. When the wearer raises their hands, the sigils flare to life with a muted glow, and the world seems to tilt toward a slower drumbeat, as if the very air conspires to hear the command whispered through bone and leather. They lend a tempered force to every strike, a clarity to snaps of gesture that make even the littlest motion feel deliberate, almost surgical. It isn’t merely about raw power; the gauntlets carry a cadence—the way they encourage meticulous timing, the way a necromancer or frontline bruiser can coax a tethered minion to surge forward, or convert a moment of pain into a sliver of advantage. Worn by those who walk the line between coercion and care, they are a reminder that prowess is a craft, not a possession. The gauntlets’ allure isn’t only in their hands-on power but in what they symbolize within the world’s shifting factions. You don’t trade for them; you negotiate with memory. People speak of the Citadel’s pale libraries, where scribes tall as towers once cataloged the fall of armies and the rise of quiet mercies offered to the living and the dead alike. They are prized by those who walk the borderland between discipline and opportunism, sought by showy battlemages and pragmatic healers who see combat as a form of conversation rather than a spectacle. And so, the market speaks in hushed tones about what a pair like this can fetch, especially when a buyer walks through Saddlebag Exchange, where the rattle of coins and the rustle of parchment mingle with whispered rumors. A recent exchange there carried talk of a pair moving for a price that echoed through taverns and workshops—enough to turn heads from the harbor to the citadel gates. These gauntlets are more than gear; they are a narrative worn on the skin, the kind of artifact that binds a fighter’s fate to the memory of the Citadel and the quiet, unyielding order that it once promised to keep, even in the darkest corridors of power.