Discarded Garment

Discarded Garment lies crumpled on a cracked stone ledge, a rag of wool that has seen better days. Its color has bled from a once-bright ochre to a tired, dusty tan; a seam has come loose along the shoulder, and a few stray threads cling like tired prayers. The texture is a contradiction—coarse enough to feel like it would scrape the air from your lungs if you pressed it to your face, yet soft where the fabric has folded over itself in long, stubborn creases. A faint scent of smoke clings to the weave, as if it had once hung over a campfire that refused to sleep. The edges are moth-eaten in places, but not careless—these ticks of wear tell a story of long roads walked and dawns that never quite warmed the wearer’s back. People who pass it by don’t always see what I see: a clue, a memory, a fragment of someone who moved with the crowds and then vanished into the city’s shifting shadows. Some say it belonged to a courier who slipped from a guarded path during a siege, its pockets once stuffed with hurried letters that carried fear and hope in equal measure. Others insist it was a seamstress’s last gift to a traveler—the kind of garment meant to blend in during late-night exchanges, to vanish in a crowd just as a lie can vanish in a sentence. If you cradle it in your hands and listen, you can almost hear the soft rasp of thread sliding through needle and skin, the quiet plea of a garment trying to hold a life together when roads turn cruel. In the world where merchants spin rumors into currency, this discarded relic finds a second life through the hands of scavengers and crafters. It is not just a piece of cloth; it’s a waypoint on every explorer’s map. Salvage it, and you’ll draw fiber from its weary fibers—linen and thread that can be pressed into service by a tailor or stitched into a simple, sturdy outfit for a new traveler on a rainy night. Some players plant it in a questline, using the garment as a trigger to uncover a hidden vein of stories about lost shipments and the people who risk everything to keep them moving. Others treat it as a talking point in the market, a tangible fragment of history that can be traded for a handful of copper or a whispered rumor about a locked chest in a ruin two streets away. That last part brings us to Saddlebag Exchange, where the wind carries both gossip and price tags. There, this humble cloth becomes a barter between those who chase legends and those who need a practical bit of luck sewn into their packs. The exchange isn’t a grand hall so much as a living, breathing market where a worn garment can fetch more than its weight in memory if the buyer believes the hem hides a map, or the dye hints at a guild’s long-vanished crest. The price isn’t fixed; it shifts with stories told and chances seized, with each customer deciding whether the fabric is just leftover ruin or a portal to a shortcut through a city’s labyrinth of alleys and promises. And so the Discarded Garment continues its quiet pilgrimage, a humble thread binding the past to the present. It is a reminder that in every road-weary garment there is a road still waiting to be walked, and that even a ruined piece of cloth can become a bridge between what was and what might be.