Rag

Rag is a slender rectangle of cloth, its weave aged and edges frayed like torn parchment. The color has bled to dusty caramel, saved only by a stubborn thread of blue along one long edge. The texture tells its story: soft where hands rubbed it, crisp where the loom left a crease. If you press it to your skin, you might smell rain on riverbank soil and a hint of campfire long snuffed out. Some dismiss it as junk, but those with an eye for signs know better; the rag carries memory, a trace of a banner that once fluttered above a caravan trusting wind and dust. In the market, that memory translates into use. Traders claim it was torn from a shield-bearer's cloth or from a courier’s sleeve, but origin hardly matters. What matters is utility: folded and wrapped around a wound to blot blood, laid over a torn saddle strap to slow leather’s fray, or used by crafters as a versatile material for patching, wrapping, or binding. The rag is not glamorous, but it is honest work—a small piece of fabric that keeps a mount safer, a traveler drier, a pack stubborn against weather. That practicality travels far in Tyria, and so does the rag’s reputation. It is a thread in a larger tapestry, a sign that someone cared enough to mend rather than replace. Its role in gameplay is humble but venerable: a common salvage material that patches life on the road. Crafters shape patchwork pouches and belts, or stiffen the interiors of a traveler’s saddlebag with a few decisive folds. Worn versions grant a little extra durability to low-tier gear, while dyed and pressed ones fetch a higher price for the right collector. When a weary traveler returns to the Saddlebag Exchange, the rag is often the first thing to catch a buyer’s eye. They talk of copper splinters and the occasional old silver piece, enough to tempt a seamstress to trade a handful of cloth for a spool of thread or a pot of resin. The exchange hums with trade as the rag shifts hands, a reminder that in Tyria every scrap has a function, every story a seam, every journey a path back to home. And so Rag endures, not as a relic alone, but as a living thread in the ongoing story of a world that keeps stitching itself back together. Some stories insist the rag can be traced along Tyria’s routes, from salt flats to frost-wrowned passes. A peddler in Divinity’s Reach once claimed to have traded a single rag for a map that led to a hidden cache of leather; the market still retells that tale in hushed tones. Others use it as a decorative patch, sailors stitching a blue thread into their sails for luck and telling strangers that Rag lent its thread to the wind. In day-to-day play, rag remains a humble instrument of survival; in the longer arc of Tyria’s history, it ties together the traumas, the repairs, and the small miracles that keep people moving.