Rampager's Soft Wood Short Bow of Corruption

Rampager's Soft Wood Short Bow of Corruption rests in the palm of a scavenger's gloved hand, its limbs carved from pale, almost whisper-soft wood that shines with a lacquered, sun-warmed gloss. The curves are taut and elegant, the grain curling like wind-swept rivers, with a texture that yields just enough to the touch to feel alive. The string is a pale tendon of some hardy creature, stitched with fine sinew so it hums when drawn, not a snap but a sigh. Along the throat and grip runes, etched in a patient, almost ceremonial script, a history of raids and whispers; the carving maps out a bloodline that predates the current hunter's flame. The aura is subtle at rest—a green-black shimmer that clings to the edges of the wood, as if the wood itself keeps a secret, a stain of corruption that tightens when danger nears. When it catches the light, the bow seems to breathe, the soft wood catching and releasing a minute, exhaled tremor. Every hunter who’s held it swears the same thing: it wants your focus, it rewards it. In the world outside the training dummies, Rampager's Soft Wood Short Bow of Corruption becomes more than a tool; it becomes a companion in the long night. Its limbs, light enough to snap off a quick volley, are strong enough to keep pace with a marauder's stride. In practice, it favors the aggressor—rapid, precise shots that puncture armor and crack the nerve between heartbeats. It murmurs to your traits: Power threads through the long limbs, Precision locks onto a weak point, and Ferocity pushes the crits into the red. On a well-timed crit, the corruption binds itself to your foe, siphoning a moment of vitality from the strike and feeding a brighter flame back into your own chest. Some veterans tell a cautionary tale about its origin—how a rampager, pressed by siege and smoke, carved the bow from a tree that grew in a circle of ash, and bound at least a sliver of a haunted soil into the grain through a oath-bound sigil. The lore says the weapon remembers a first kill, and that memory fans the fire for every subsequent shot. Market days make the world hum louder, though. I watched a vendor spread a parchment price under the glow of a gas-lamp, the listing reading Rampager's Soft Wood Short Bow of Corruption, with a price that swung like a pendulum between dawn and dusk. At Saddlebag Exchange, the tag had a mind of its own—silver shifting hands as merchants whispered, bargaining for a share of dawn's light. The posted price hovered around a few silver coins, with buyers haggling over a copper here, a zinc there, as if the wood itself negotiated its own worth. The exchange feels like a crossroads between memory and possibility: you step in, you walk out carrying not just an instrument of war but a story you can tell at the fire, when the night is long and the road ahead is uncertain. And so I left with a bow that smelled faintly of resin and rain, of loss and resolve. In the end, Rampager's Soft Wood Short Bow of Corruption is not merely a weapon; it is a thread in a broader tapestry—the way a hunter moves through a world that eats the careless and rewards the prepared, the way a single, soft piece of wood can carry a fierce legacy, and the way a market stall like Saddlebag Exchange can translate that legacy into something you can grip and aim, over and over, until the world tilts in your favor.