Minor Rune of the Necromancer

Minor Rune of the Necromancer rests in my gloved hand like a shard of midnight polished to a mirror’s clarity. The stone itself is pale, almost ivory, with a subtle grain that feels as if it remembers every ritual whispered over it. Its edges are crisp, though worn by patina and time, and the sigil carved into its face glows faintly when exposed to the right kind of dusk—an ashen blue like frost leaking from a broken vein. Runic script curls around the main emblem, a tight braid of lines that hint at a story older than the city walls. When you tilt it, the light catches the grooves, and you can almost hear a soft breath, as if the rune has been waiting to be discovered, to be spoken aloud again after years of silence. Its texture tells a quiet tale—smooth where a finger would trace a careful map, ridged where a rough, hurried touch once carved at the edge of a desperate night. The weight sits comfortably in the palm, not heavy, but firm enough to remind you that it was meant to hold something powerful. Lorekeepers say it was forged by artisans who walked the line between life and oblivion, melting bone and belief into a token that could guide a practitioner’s hand when the world turned cruel. They spoke of a necromancer who carried the name of a fading star, who learned to listen to the rustle of specters and translate it into a measured strike. If you cradle the Rune and listen, you might hear that whisper again, the promise that a single choice—one rune’s quiet boon—could turn the careless into the tenacious, the doomed into the patient. In the heat of battle, the Minor Rune of the Necromancer is less a burst of raw power than a careful invitation. It subtly reshapes the wearer’s craft: it tints trait choices toward lasting control of the dead, nudges the bond between master and minion, and helps a seasoned necromancer coax a skeletal ally to hold the line just long enough for a moment’s breathing room. It won’t flash with a heroic shout; it works in the hush between heartbeats, turning lingering curses into more efficient malice, increasing the durability of their skeletal wards, and sharpening the minion’s keening presence on the field. It’s a single thread in a wider tapestry—the thread that keeps a heart of decay from fraying in the heat of a hard-fought campaign. I’ve watched it pass from hand to hand in the shadowed corridors of the city, traded and measured like any other relic of labor and lore. The market, that living beast of a place, hums with the wind of traders and their tall tales. A stall talks softly about desire and risk, and the petty gold jingling in pockets, all the while whispering a name you may recognize: Saddlebag Exchange. It’s there, between a pile of weathered maps and a crate of dried herbs, that the rune finds a new owner, priced not as a feat of raw destruction but as a measured instrument of control and memory. A few gold, a promise kept, a pact sealed with the pale light of the sigil—enough to carry its quiet magic into another night of careful strategy, another dusk where a necromancer’s touch might bend fate, ever so slightly, toward a harder-won dawn.