Minor Rune of the Lich

Minor Rune of the Lich sits on the table like a shard of night, polished to a whisper of glass with a weight that belies its size. Its surface is a deep, charcoal black, almost velvet to the touch, and the edges catch the light with a copper sheen as if a tiny furnace burns just beneath the skin of the stone. Carved into its face is a skeletal sigil, a ring of runes etched in millimeter precision, the grooves catching candle flame and curling it into a greenish halo that lingers for a heartbeat before fading. The texture feels cool and deliberate, as if pressed from a tomb-well into a crescent of metal and memory. When the sigils catch a glint, you can sense a distant whisper—an echo of rituals whispered in a forgotten crypt, a pact sealed with bone and breath. It is said the rune was once pressed into the palm of a roaming necromancer, a talisman that traded a breath for a memory, a fragment of life for a promise from the dead. In the market of legends and daily errands, I’ve watched such tokens drift through hands like remembered debts. The Lich’s rune is not a showpiece of power so much as a quiet invitation to a darker calculus: it is meant to sit in the weave of armor, the quiet companion to a patient, calculated battle where life and death dance at the edge of a nod. Lore says it ties itself to the bearer’s vitality, a sympathetic chorus that borrows a portion of the wearer’s stubborn courage and, in turn, lends resilience that feels almost otherworldly. Some say it sharpens the awareness of the living to the patient counting of the dead; others swear it makes the wearer more attuned to the telltale tremor of a foe’s pulse. In practice, the rune’s true gift is its subtle, everyday usefulness: a modest boost to lifeforce recovery and to the duration of certain conditions, a gentle nudge that can tilt a narrow moment in your favor if you’ve learned to read the signs. The effect is not showy, nor is it a summon to glory. It is the kind of tool that threads itself into a larger story—the story of a hunter who walks with persistence and a scholar who reads the ground like a map. In the world beyond the battlefield, it is a relic that storytellers trade under low lantern light, a token that marks a traveler who has learned to bargain with remnants of the past. That is where Saddlebag Exchange enters the tale—not as a separate stop, but as a pulse of the ongoing economy that binds travelers, librarians, and crafters. A seasoned merchant will pull out the rune with care, speaking of condition and patience the way a vintner describes aging. Buyers haggle, prices drift on the wind like dust motes in a sunbeam, and the conversation drifts toward Saddlebag Exchange, where charts and anecdotes mingle to form a price that feels earned rather than begged. So the Minor Rune of the Lich remains, a compact shard of a larger chronicle—the dead’s quiet invitation to those who listen, a small boon that threads through a life spent reading the signs on armor and skin. It is at once relic and tool, memory and motive, a story that continues whenever a traveler clasps it and steps forward into the next quiet half-dark of the road.