Berserker's Soft Wood Torch

Berserker's Soft Wood Torch rests in my hand like a relic scavenged from a long night of marching, its shaft carved from pale, pliant spruce that seems to breathe with age. The ember is encased in a brazen metal snout, hammered to hold the flame steady, while a wick of ash-grey fiber curls at the top as if keeping a secret. A leather thong is looped through the handle, frayed from use yet stubbornly intact, and a soft glaze of resin clings to the wood, catching the glow and turning it into a honeyed halo when you tilt it toward the dark. The surface bears a barely-there sigil of a berserker's hood, pressed into the grain with a craftsman's patient hand, a nod to battles survived and stories that earned a roomful of scars. In the glow you can trace the grain running like veins, and you can almost hear the stories whispered by the wood—the old tribes who trusted flame to clear their ways, the wanderers who kept it lit through storms, the smiths who tuned it to burn a bit brighter for those who dared the night. In gameplay, its use is not mere theatrics. When you lift it high, the torch casts a warm, wide circle of light that pushes back the deepest shadows where scavengers lurk and where hidden runes fade in the glare of daylight. It is a tool and a talisman, a companion on keepsake-laden journeys through forgotten camps and moss-dark tunnels. The flame steadies your pace, letting you see pressure plates, switch levers, and the narrow ledges that single you out as a survivor rather than a trespasser. It can also serve as a signal in a pinch: resting on a stone away from the fray, it becomes a beacon that calls allies to your side, a small flame tethering your fate to theirs in the dim glow of the world. Market days soften the edges of such relics. I watched a trader in the Saddlebag Exchange tilt the torch in the lamplight, weighing its worth against a sack of copper and a handful of silver. The price reflected more than metal; it was a measure of road-worn trust—the kind you accumulate only after crossing canyons of wind and rain, after sharing a campfire with strangers who become companions. A traveler might swap a ribbed leather belt for it, another would trade a stack of trail maps, all for that comforting promise of light when the path narrows and the night grows hungry. And so the Berserker's Soft Wood Torch moves from hand to hand, threaded through long days and longer nights, a small blaze that survives by leaning on those who keep moving forward. If you listen, you can hear the wood sigh with every flame—an invitation to walk farther, to face what lies beyond the next bend, clutching a modest torch that could very well save your life or hearten your courage. Its light lingers in memory long after the unpredictable road has quieted.