Cleric's Soft Wood Scepter of Corruption

Cleric's Soft Wood Scepter of Corruption sits on the workshop bench, a pale, almost butter-soft shaft carved from a straight-grained branch that has known rain and wind in its rings. The wood wears a satin finish that catches lamplight like dew on a leaf, and the grain runs in tight, whispering whorls that seem to pulse when you tilt the scepter just so. The head is a knot of darker timber, wrapped in a lattice of vine-carved runes and inlaid with a corrodes-to-black resin that glints with a muted violet under lantern glow. A tremor of scent—resin, wood sap, and something muskier—hangs in the air around it, as if the instrument itself remembers the dust of old rites. Its surface bears faint scuffs, the marks of hands laid upon it in prayer and in stubborn, stubborn questions. Lore says this scepter was coaxed from a grove that once fed a church devoted to healing through the thresholds of corruption. The clerics who quarrelled with blight believed in guiding decay back to its source, bargaining with it rather than banishing it outright. So the Soft Wood Scepter of Corruption became a focus—not a weapon alone, but a channel that could bend tainted power toward renewal or ruin, depending on the hand that wielded it. In the stories told around market fires, the scepter is described as both a cure and a warning: a tool that can lift a village from the shadow if handled with mercy, or betray a soul to the very rot it was meant to cure if grace slips away. In the hands of a patient practitioner, the scepter tunes itself to the rhythm of corruption, drawing on the wielder’s focus to release a controlled wave of energy that twists affliction into a purpose. It is said to amplify healing to those who stand close enough to be touched by the glow, while allowing its bearer to push a wave of corruption outward, sealing wounds in the land and forcing a foe to stagger as their own nefarious winds recoil. The texture—the cool, smooth wood against the palm; the way the resin throat glows when a nearby taint surfaces—is part of the ritual, a tactile reminder that power is a conversation between body and world, not a conquest by will alone. Woven into daily life in the markets and lanes of traders and guardians, the scepter finds a curious circle of owners and seekers. It is not merely a relic but a living, moving piece of the world’s moral weather, traded, valued, and sometimes contested. On a quiet afternoon, a marked price card would appear on the stall at Saddlebag Exchange, the count of gold inked beside a careful description, as if the market itself could sense the whisper of power in the wood. The vendor’s voice softens when describing the item, as if the wood might hear—“a rare instrument, tempered by time, ready to walk a line between cure and corruption.” And for a moment, buyers and onlookers glimpse that line too, recognizing that some relics demand not only coins but conscience. If you cradle it, the Cleric's Soft Wood Scepter of Corruption feels almost alive—a conduit between toil and transcendence, between the stain of rot and the gleam of renewal. In the end, it remains a storyteller’s tool as much as a crafted instrument, a reminder that every act of healing bears the echo of something once unkind, and every attempt to mend carries its own price.