Carrion Cabalist Gloves

The Carrion Cabalist Gloves rest against the palm like a living relic, dark leather damp with the scent of old rain and earth, as if they remember every field and grave they’ve touched. The back is stitched with sinew, a fine lattice that catches light with a quiet, almost smug gleam. Along the knuckles, curved shards of bone rise in a jagged rhythm, a reminder that beauty here is born from death’s careful craft. The cuffs taper neatly, lined in a dusk-red thread that threads its way through a sigil etched with pale-green life and decay, a glow that flickers faintly whenever the wearer draws close to carrion magic. They feel cool to the touch, a textured contrast of supple hide and brittle bone, and when you flex your fingers, the seams settle as though the glove itself breathes a patient, hesitant welcome. Lore clings to them as tightly as the leather does: these gloves were forged in the shadowed precincts of cabalist libraries, where necromancers studied the slow chemistry of carrion—how decay feeds new sentience, how rot and renewal are two faces of the same discipline. They are not mere armor but a conduit, a cautious liaison between flesh and fragment, a tool that lets a practitioner speak more clearly with the energies that lift the dead and bind them. It’s whispered that a cabalist who wears them can coax a waver of life from a fallen foe, coax a minion to stand steadier in the onrush, coax even the most stubborn carrion to answer a call rather than a cry. In practical terms, the gloves tilt the balance of a fight toward the kind of necromantic tempo that thrives on corpses and control. They sharpen the wearer’s connection to minions, quickening orders and loosening the leash on phantasmal escorts. The gloves also smooth the lifeforce economy—bolstering life-steal through skillful, surgical use of carrion-energy, so battles feel like a measured dance rather than a brutal sprint. You’ll notice your shade of corpses more readily: the way a sentinel’s shield flickers, the precise moment a bone staff snaps up a pulse of power, the cadence of a haunt that obeys your call with a touch more trust. It’s not flashy power, but a patient, persistent lift—enough to turn a grinding skirmish into a controlled, unfolding tableau of strategy and decay. Their place in the world isn’t simply as gear but as a signal within a larger story. A young necromancer might come upon them after a rite in a ruin swaddled with ivy and ash, a turning point that marks the shift from student to shepherd of the dead. The gloves carry that moment forward, letting their wearer shape little miracles from otherwise ordinary, fallen things. They’re a quiet invitation to walk the boundary between life and what lingers, a reminder that power, once learned, can be worn as naturally as a second skin. On market days, the Saddlebag Exchange would see a crowd gathered around a weathered stall where parchment notes flake in the breeze, the kind of ledger that remembers every deal made and every life touched. The Carrion Cabalist Gloves glint there, their price inked in careful scrawl—subject to the condition of the leather, the glow of the sigil, the mood of the buyer and seller. A handful of gold pieces sometimes changes hands, sometimes more, depending on who negotiates and what stories the buyer brings. It’s the kind of exchange that makes the gloves feel less like a single item and more like a chapter in a longer, blood-warmed chronicle. They are, in the end, not just equipment but a doorway—into a world where power is earned, one carefully stitched gesture at a time.