Decaying Mass

Decaying Mass sits heavy in the palm, a swollen, mottled orb the color of bruise-darkened rot. Its skin is slick and cold, a lacquered glaze that gives way to a sticky resin when pressed. Iron-gray veins spider beneath the surface, pulsing faintly as if a tremor lives just beneath the rind. Held to a lamplight, the thing glints with the dull shine of coins buried in swamp mud, and the breath you take seems thick with coppery musk and something long dead. A slow, irregular heartbeat answers the rhythm of your own, the thing within choosing whether you will cradle it or be consumed by its inevitability. The texture is a strange chorus of textures—gristle and jelly, bone and sap—shifting with the slightest tremor of the hand, a reminder that decay here is not a static museum piece but a living, listening relic. Lorekeepers whisper that it is not mere rot but an anchor, a seed planted by forgotten necromancers to tether a sleeper sentience to the living world. In the dim corridors of ruined temples, scholars claimed the Mass was used to coax lifeblood back into the drained or to barter with a realm where time runs backward. Its appearance abroad, though, is never pure mystery; traders tell the same story differently: a harvest taken from a cursed grove, a byproduct of rites meant to bind old powers to new bargains. When the Mass surfaces in quests or fieldcraft, it feels less like loot and more like a hinge—a point where the present caves in toward a past that never truly passed. In practical hands, the Decaying Mass becomes an instrument in the hands of those who read the world’s rot as a language. Alchemists grind it into a viscous, amber-dark paste to seed rot-infused tinctures, elixirs that let a healer tilt the balance toward endurance for a moment longer, or to fuel the necromancer’s experiments with life-blood mechanics that keep minions dogging your steps even when the sun seems determined to burn away the swamp. Crafters thread it into components for weapons and armor that flourish in damp places—decayed runes etched on bone, a grip warmed by a necrotic breath, a shield that feels heavier with every hurried heartbeat of your foe. It’s not simply a resource; it’s a narrative device, a tangible reminder that decay can be a tool, a shield, a voice in the chorus of the battlefield. The market breathes around it, as restless as the swamps themselves. If you listen closely in the harbor town or at the dim stalls along the caravan routes, you’ll hear whispers about price and scarcity, how the Mass fetches a premium when the necromantic season aligns with festival hunts. Saddlebag Exchange, the floating marketplace where caravans lay their wares and prices drift with the tide of demand, becomes the pulse of its value. There you’ll see Decaying Mass listed in quiet rows, fluctuating between the low silver and the brisk jingle of a few copper, sometimes spiking when a guild seeks a concentrated dose for a grand project. A traveler might trade it for a bundle of rare hides or a chord of obsidian glass, but more often, someone pays in the coin of trust—because the Mass is not merely what you own but what you dare to bind to your next risk. And so the Mass remains: a grotesque seed of possibility, heavy in the hand and lighter with each choice you make. It is a relic that asks you what you will do with rot when rot is a tool, a hinge, a story you choose to tell aloud in the shadowed market where the world’s edges blur and the pulse of decay keeps time with your bravest steps.