Carrion Elder Inscription

The Carrion Elder Inscription is a worn shard, a bone-black tile etched with a living map of glyphs that twist like dried vines across its surface. Its texture is a paradox: cool and smooth where the incisions run deep, gritty at the edges where the stone has chipped away, as if it memorizes every touch. On a clear night the sigil seems to shimmer faintly, a pale thread of light threading through the hollow of a skull crowned with thorny tendrils. People who have handled it describe a smell of old rain and grave-mold, as if the thing had slept beneath the earth for many seasons and woke with the memory of every whisper spoken above it. The lore ties it to the carrion elder—a creature said to feed on the echoes of fallen battles and to barter with the living only after the dead have learned to speak in sighs. If a tale is true, the inscription remembers those sighs and keeps their rhythm, guiding a hand that seeks to bend fate by necromantic means. In the hands of a practiced wielder, the inscription is less a relic and more a channel. It breathes into the user’s craft, tightening the bond between flesh and aura, and it alters how certain necromantic practices land on the battlefield. Some say it amplifies lifeforce siphon, making every drain feel more deliberate; others notice that their minions endure a fraction longer, as if the earth itself lends a stubborn, stubborn patience to the summoned. The inscription does not scream for attention; it greases the gears of a ritual, letting a quiet voice in the back of the mind count the beats of a tainted melody and time the next gesture with a careful, calculated mercy. It is the kind of tool that asks its owner to listen as much as to cast, to hear the soft tremor in a bone-white link between host and specter, and to accept that power sometimes arrives as a whisper rather than a roar. Marketplaces are full of such whispers, and the Saddlebag Exchange is one of the places where the whispers travel farthest. I watched a quiet exchange happen there—an old trader counting coins with a thumbprint of rust on the brass, a younger buyer tracing the sigil with a gloved finger, eyes wide with the gravity of what a single insignia can do in the right hands. The price shifted with the crowd, slipping like rain between the fingers of vendors who know that a Carrion Elder Inscription is as much promise as weapon. A handful of gold, perhaps, or a trade of rarer trinkets steeped in their own legends. The market is a chorus of bargain and memory, and the inscription finds a new voice in every deal, its quiet glow a reminder that relics belong not only to the past but to the choices we dare to make in the present.