Berserker's Iron Mace

Berserker's Iron Mace rests on the workbench like a small, immovable moon, its head a block of dark iron hammered to a stubborn sheen. The surface bears a lattice of strike marks, each dent a memory of a crowded battlefield, and a row of rune-carved grooves runs along the spine, faint but stubborn as a veteran's scar. The haft is wrapped in cracked leather that once held a sturdier grip, now worn smooth by years of use, and the pommel bears a blunt cap shaped into a snarling animal visage, meant to catch a fall and bite back. Its weight sits heavy in the hand, even when laid across a shoulder, and the whole thing carries the scent of smoke, oil, and old iron—an artifact molded by heat into a tool of decisive moments. Lore says it was forged in the furnace of a Berserker warband, tempered with chants that urged the warrior to stand firm while the world roared around them; some legends insist the weapon remembers its champion's final, furious breath, and that memory lends the mace a heady sense of inevitability to those who hold it. In play, the Berserker's Iron Mace is the kind of ally who makes the frontline feel like a doorway to the next step in the fight. Its heavy head lands with a thud that shivers shields and rattles armor, pushing aside hesitation as surely as it pushes aside mail. Warriors and guardians who lean into it discover a rhythm: a quick, decisive swing to break the line, followed by a second strike that saps an enemy's resolve and leaves them open for teammates to press home an attack. There is no flash of magic here—just raw momentum and the quiet confidence that comes from a weapon that has spent decades learning which way yawning armor tends to fail. It invites you to think not of slaying alone but of protecting a crew, of turning a skirmish into a story where everyone survives to tell the tale. Market talk slips into the scene as a caravan stops at the Saddlebag Exchange, the open market where traders lay out their wares on cloth and plank in the shade of a lean-to. A weary dealer pieces together the value of that iron head and the leather-wrapped grip, weighing it not just in copper but in memory—the price a fair exchange for a weapon that has carried two or three purses of stories along its edge. My companion traded a map of a burnt province for the mace, a trade that felt like a chapter turning in a longer book, the kind of moment you remember when you steady your grip and step into the next conflict. And so the Berserker's Iron Mace remains, glinting now with a new story, ready to become part of whatever storm comes next.