Regurgitated Mass

Regurgitated Mass sits heavy in the palm, a pale, gelatinous lump the size of a fist, slick and rubbery to the touch. Its surface gleams with a thin film like glassy mucus, and the edges mirror a brittle rind that flakes away when you thumb it too roughly. Press your thumb to it and the thing yields with a damp sigh, a soft suction that clings to skin and breath, as if you’ve just unearthed a memory that didn’t quite want to be remembered. The color rides somewhere between dead honey and sour lime, with blotches of bruised green that shift when lantern light catches the glisten. There is a sour, kitchen-night smell about it, faintly metallic, like rusting tools left in a damp cellar, mixed with something more medicinal, almost antiseptic, as if the thing itself were trying to cure you of whatever questions it raises. Lore fans the flames of curiosity with whispers. Some traders swear it’s a relic from the stomach-chamber of a behemoth that never truly died, a remnant of feasting that defies simple disposal. Others insist it is the world’s digestive memory, a stubborn residue of ancient battles played out in the viscera of creatures long forgotten. The Mass is said to carry echoes of digestion—the way a hunter’s meal lingers, not just in flavor but in intent—so that those who work with it feel as though they’re handling an artifact that has absorbed, absorbed, absorbed, until it could tell you a story if it could find a mouth to speak with. In more practical circles, it’s treated as a rare reagent: something that can be coaxed, with care and the right alchemical hand, into extradimensional glazes, potent infusions, or catalysts for experiments that blur the line between craft and rite. In the market lanes where vendors tout curiosity as loudly as their wares, the Mass moves like a living rumor, traded, weighed, weighed again, and weighed once more against the risk of bad luck. I watched a quiet exchange at the Saddlebag Exchange, where a leather-skinned merchant laid the Mass on a scale that sang under his fingers. The price wobbled between a couple of silver and a handful of coins, then settled as if a cord had been pulled tight—the kind of negotiation that happens when someone genuinely believes they hold a key to a door no one else knows exists. The Mass isn’t a common junket; it’s the kind of reagent that makes a craftsman pause, the sort of curiosity that can upend a shop’s routine if enough people share the same dream of what could be made from it. And so it travels, tucked away in a saddlebag, traded by the glow of street lamps, traded to those who hear its promise and know what, exactly, they want to conjure from it. To hold Regurgitated Mass is to hold a hinge—between appetite and invention, between memory and experiment, between what a creature left behind and what a tinker might coax into life. It reminds us that the world’s larger stories are written not just in grand battles, but in the quiet, squelching moments of curiosity where a mass of viscous, living history becomes a tool, a rumor, and a possibility all at once.