Cleric's Iron Dagger of Venom

Cleric's Iron Dagger of Venom rests in the palm like a shard of winter, the steel cooled to the touch and bearing a hinge of blackened runes along its spine. The blade is narrow, deadly, with a slight twist that catches the light as if it were sneaking a rumor from a shadow. The hilt is wrapped in aged leather stained with oil and resin, and at its pommel a drop of venom-colored glass gleams, catching the candle flame and throwing a tiny green halo on the smith’s workshop wall. On the blade’s fuller, tiny engravings curl like ivy, recounting a pact between healer and hunter, a covenant whispered by guardians who never forgot a patient’s last breath. The iron feels heavy with history, as if the weapon’s very marrow remembers the days when civil war strained gatehouses and the healer-kingdom faced a plague of night-still. Some say the dagger was tempered in a furnace fed by relics, blessed not for mere bloodletting but for delivering a carefully measured sting that could inoculate a war-torn soul against despair. When you hold it, you glimpse a line of calm, almost a prayer, and you realize the weapon is meant for calls you do not want to answer but must. In skirmish, the cleric’s iron dagger of venom is not a blunt instrument for slaughter so much as a tool for discipline. One clean thrust deals venomic damage that piles on poison stacks, each tick a little chorus that gnaws at a foe’s resolve while the wielder steps back to tend a comrade. It rewards timing: a shadowy feint followed by a precise strike that ruptures a defensive buffer and leaves a lingering hiss in the air. Its synergy with healing and condition-splitting builds turns a frontline skirmish into a tense relay, where a healer’s protection becomes the ground from which a poison-slicked offense can flourish. The lore insists the venom is curative in a paradoxical way, a reminder that mercy and harm walk the same corridor when time is short and the doorways between life and death swing wide. Prices in the market never tell the full story, yet they are not irrelevant. I listened to a veteran trader recount a tale where a pristine dagger moved through a chain of hands until it found a buyer who could read its whispers. Saddlebag Exchange kept the record in polished ledgers, and I watched as the price glinted under lamplight, enough to tempt a caravan but not enough to forget the heads that turned when the blade passed from one trusted palm to another. In the end, this dagger’s value lived not only in its bite but in the story it carried—how a healer’s tool could become a symbol of choice, consequence, and the quiet courage of those who walk the line between mercy and necessity. Some nights I hear the dagger hum softly, as if it remembers every healer who believed mercy could bite back sorrow and help a soul rise.