Berserker's Soft Wood Torch of Blood

Berserker's Soft Wood Torch of Blood sits warm in my gloved hand, the pale wood of its shaft smooth as bone. The grain runs in soft, honeyed curves, knots catching the light as if tiny eyes watch you. The head is crowned with a scarred brass ferrule, and runes burnished in red lacquer creep around its circumference like a whispered oath. Its wick, soaked in resin from a blood-tinged tree, flicks with a crimson glow that bites at the night and softens the edges of danger. When the flame catches, the air around it seems to lean in, listening for footsteps you cannot hear. Legends say the torch was pressed into service by a berserker who rode with a caravan through the Bloodmist Pass, where raiders hunted the screen of dawn. The wood, cut from a soft tree that grows where the blood trees dream, holds a memory of those days. It breathes with a faint, ancient heat, a pulse you can feel more than hear, as if the wood remembers every scream and every promise made in the dark. If you tilt it just so, the red lacquered runes glow faintly, not to boast, but to remind you of the vow made to protect kin and camp alike. In gameplay terms, the torch is more than a light source; it is a companion in the liminal hours, when the map narrows to a tunnel and the only horizon is the ember’s edge. Carrying it shifts the mood of the field—creatures of shadow bend away from your glare, and secret sigils etched into cavern walls flare into life under its ruby glow. In the heat of motion, the flame seems to catch on your ferocity, and the aura of a berserker’s courage hums through the party: the closer you hold it, the more your strikes ring with intent. It also serves practical ends—igniting resin traps, burning away damp fog, or guiding a slow march through a crater of ash where lanterns fear to tread. On a windy afternoon, I ducked into the Saddlebag Exchange, a lantern-lit ark of belts and bric-a-brac, where merchants barter with coins that click like frost on iron. The torches there move with a different life—their prices stitched into the cloth of the vendors’ booths, calculated for the traveler who must decide what to carry into the next flare of battle. They weighed the Berserker's Soft Wood Torch of Blood with care, whispered of its lineage, and finally placed a price tag that read in the ledger: two gold pieces, with the chance of a modest discount if you spoke of blood and caravan routes. The exchange, ever practical, swapped stories as it swapped wares, and I walked away with a knowing grin and a lighter pocket, the torch slung low as a beacon for the road ahead. Back under the open sky, the torch glows like a heartbeat in the hand, a link between memory and moment, between the rage that carved its wood and the quiet patience of travel. It is not just light; it is a vow, a waypoint, and a stubborn flame that says we are still here, still moving, still watching the world burn away its darkness one ember at a time.