The Superior Rune of the Afflicted rests in my hand like a coin lived-in by a thousand paths, a small disk of dark, weathered stone etched with fine sigils that catch the light with a pale, almost sickly green glow. Its surface is rough as old bark, cool to the touch, and when you tilt it just so a faint tremor travels under your skin, as if the rune remembers every plague it once touched. The edges are worn from chance encounters and quick-handed trades, yet the center still hums with a quiet vitality, a pulse that seems to sync with the wearer’s own breath. If you study the glyphs—coil upon coil of runic script—their meaning slides into focus: a ward, a tether, a pact with the Afflicted, those whose flesh has learned to endure what would destroy others. In a way, the stone feels alive with memory—the memory of villages quarantined at dusk, of healers who glimpsed too far into the rot, and of a stubborn persistence that would not surrender to the plague. Lore clings to it like a damp evening fog. The Afflicted are not mere corpses, nor are they simple victims; they are a stubborn lineage of disease-worn beings who learned to thrive amid blight. The rune’s sigils are said to have been carved by hands that walked that edge between decay and cure, a balance the world could scarcely hold. Wear it, some whisper, and you borrow a portion of that stubborn resilience—the stubbornness to keep standing when others would bow. In the right circumstances, the rune becomes more than ornament; it becomes a promise that damage will linger and pests will be forced to answer for the damage done, a small mercy granted to those who dare walk with rot at their side. In practice, its usefulness threads through the battlefield like a vine. It is most potent for builds that play with conditions—poison, bleeding, burning, and the like—because the rune’s power thrives on the very effects so many enemies dread. When a foe carries the marked sting of your conditions, the rune grows louder in the room, extending the duration of those afflictions, sharpening the friction between blight and defense, and nudging the fight toward a moment where decay becomes a weapon and a shield at once. It prizes patience: you apply, you wait, you let the rot do its quiet work while you hold fast, ready for the moment when an ally’s heal or a well-timed burst of damage turns the tide. Marketplace memory shapes the story, too. At Saddlebag Exchange, the stall sign that flickers in the wind, I watched a wary trader roll out a small catalog of favors and relics, including a Superior Rune of the Afflicted. The price tag wasn’t a joke, but it wasn’t a trap either—the kind of fair price you earn by listening to stories from the road and weighing what you’ve carried for months against what a single rune might unlock in a moment of desperate need. We bargained, we traded a few story-worn trinkets and a memory of storm-torn skirmishes, and when the vellum receipt clicked shut, the rune warmed against my palm as if confirming a debt paid in patience and grit. The world, it seems, keeps its most valuable bargains in the quiet places—where rot and resolve meet, where the afflicted endure, and where a rune can remind a traveler to endure, too.