Cleric's Iron Sword of Agony

Cleric's Iron Sword of Agony gleams with a cold, iron-blue luster, its broad blade hammered with prayer-runics and nicked from years of ritual service. The edge is crisp as frost, the fuller a shallow crevasse that catches candlelight and reveals micro-fissures like a map of all the prayers ever whispered over it. The grip is wrapped in tanned leather, smooth where the hand lands and rough toward the guard, the crossguard carved to resemble outstretched hands caught in supplication. A pewter pommel bears a seal—a hooded figure mid-prayer—that marks its allegiance to a long-forgotten order. The scent of burnt incense and rain-salted iron lingers when you draw it, as if a chapel corridor breathes from the steel itself. Locals tell of its origin in a shrine sunk beneath a rain-darkened city, where the clerics tempered the iron with their own pain until the metal remembered their prayers as surely as it remembered a pulse. The blade’s name, Agony, is not a boast but a burden—the kind that binds a healer to a cause larger than mortality. When the wind shifts through the market stalls or the holiest bells toll in the valley, the sword seems to hum with that history, a reminder that mercy can be carved, and that suffering, when offered in the right hands, can sharpen mercy rather than dull it. Those who have held it—guardians, pilgrims, weary wardens—speak of a resolve that settles into the bones the moment it is drawn, of warmth that flickers along the blade’s spine even as it cools the air around it. In combat, the weapon behaves like a steadfast companion for those who blend protection with pressure. Its ordinary strike lands with a heavy, precise arc, but each successful blow gathers a tethered torment on the target—names for the small, gnawing wounds that accumulate as the fight wears on. The wielder witnesses a subtle life-steal on critical hits, a fraction of the damage returning as health, as if the armor of the wounded were lending strength to the bearer. The sword’s true gift, however, is its capacity to weave agony into aid: a surge of radiant energy on a decisive moment can cleanse a teammate of lingering effects or briefly boost their resistance, a mercy that feels like charity written into iron. It is a weapon that asks for restraint, rewarding those who temper aggression with careful, healing intent. Prices drift in the markets as rumors drift through a rainstorm. If you bargain with a steady voice and a patient heart, you’ll hear the whispered truth of a relic that many crave yet few trust to be steady: the Saddlebag Exchange, where the blade might be priced higher when its sigils glow and lower when the prayer-lines dim. I watched a merchant adjust the tag to reflect how brightly the runes burned that day, a reminder that value in this world is as much about faith as metal. A customer might leave with a small scroll of devotion tucked into their sleeve, a quiet token that the exchange still believes in balance: discipline, sacrifice, and a blade that remembers both the healer’s oath and the road that led to it.