Corrupted Sliver

Corrupted Sliver glints with a void-slick surface, a shard of tempered night culled from the edge of some broken fate. The edge, razor-thin, catches lamplight and fractures it into a thousand tiny rainbows that feel cold to the touch. Its texture is strange: smooth as glass in places, pinprick rough along the ridges, like frost caught in a blade's grip. The core within—a red-hot heartbeat imprisoned beneath lacquered black—pulses faintly, a sign that whatever force it carries is alive enough to breathe when magic stirs nearby. Lorekeepers whisper that it did not crack from a mere rock but from the dragon's own breath, a fragment torn from a larger curse and shaped by hands that sought to tame it; those sigils along its facets read like a diary of lost power. In the markets of our wandering, the sliver moves with a careful sheen, traded between collectors and crafters who pretend not to want it too much. A keeper of oddities once told me Corrupted Slivers are prized for what they promise to awaken—small, stubborn embers of magic that can be coaxed into a weapon's grip, or glow brighter along a runic edge in armor. People speak of it like a key to open a door if you know which lock to address. Because its magic is not loud or overt, it tends to ride the edge of rumor, appearing in quiet whispers at damp tavern tables and in the gloved hands of scribes who map the black market's strange geometry. Pricing, naturally, follows those rumours, shifting with demand and the whims of luck. At Saddlebag Exchange, where traders circle like gulls over a sun-bleached pier, the ledger shows a price that drifts in the coin-silver range, sometimes higher when there’s a spike in artisans seeking to test a new infusion technique. I watched a pair of buyers haggle—their voices soft, the kind you use when you don’t want the room to know what you’re chasing. The seller pocketed the agreed sum and tucked the corroded shard back into a velvet pouch, its red core catching the lanterns and throwing a warning glow onto the cobbles. It wasn’t merely a purchase; it was a small wager that the world might bend a little in the crafter’s hands, a promise that a single sliver could tilt the balance of a forge in a city that never quite sleeps. So the Corrupted Sliver remains, not merely as loot or ornament, but as a thread spun between danger and possibility. In every glow, you hear the dragon’s sigh; in every hum of the market, the ache of power waiting for a careful hand. It is a fragment that travels through pockets and into stories, a quiet testimony to the way corruption, once fled from, now travels beside us, shining in the dark. For those who collect, it is less a relic than a decision, a moment of risk that can rewrite a night's work into something legendary. Sometimes, it changes a town's fate.