Berserker's Soft Wood Short Bow of Hobbling

Berserker's Soft Wood Short Bow of Hobbling catches the late afternoon light the moment you lift it, a slender arc of pale wood that seems almost breathless in its stillness. The limbs glow with a careful satin sheen, smooth to the touch, as if carved by someone who meant every stroke to whisper rather than shout. The wood, soft and forgiving to the palm, bears a thorofine pattern of grain that runs like pale riverbeds along the length, interrupted only by the darker grooves where the string is tied and the leather grip is wrapped in a season-worn braid. The riser bears a tiny sigil, a looping rune that might be mistaken for a mark of war only until you notice how the glinting edge is tempered with care, as though the bow was made for both speed and mercy. Its name—Hobbling—isn’t just a boast or a rumor; the wood seems to carry a memory of restraint, a deliberate paradox that a berserker might have chosen to temper even as the arrow leaves the bow with a sharp, almost gleaming sincerity. There’s a lore thread woven into its fibers, a tale of a hunter who walked a road between blood and quiet—who learned to swing with the force of a storm and yet listen for the tremble of a target’s breath. Some say the soft wood was raised in a grove tended by a hermit-smith who believed that true power bent toward balance, that a weapon’s bite should slow as it frees a hunter to think twice. Others insist the sigil on the riser is a ward against rashness, a reminder that a shot fired with haste can unravel a day’s work and a life’s plan. The bow’s very construction—lightweight but sturdy, flexible enough to snap to attention and yet so gentle in its touch—speaks to a philosophy: to be a Berserker is to walk the edge of fury and focus, to channel the first roar into a precise, measured aim. When you shoulder it, you feel the world shrink to a single moment of aim, release, and a whisper of wind that seems to carry a note of restraint back toward your shoulder. In combat, the bow is a patient instrument—short enough for tight lanes, quick enough for skirmishes, and marked by the Hobbling enchantment that slows the enemy’s pace as the arrow finds its mark. It’s not a weapon that rends a target apart but a tool that buys you space, that turns a high-stakes pursuit into a careful negotiation with gravity and time. Used in tandem with feints, snares, or terrain that invites a hunter’s foot to falter, it becomes a thread in a larger tapestry: a hunter’s quiet, a caravan’s ledger, a village’s whispered thanks for a night kept safe by a bow that moves without shouting. Market life breathes around it, too. Traders at Saddlebag Exchange speak in soft, practical terms about a bow like this—its provenance, its condition, the way the sigil has weathered a dozen winters. They haggle not just over metal and cord but over stories: the hermit’s watch, the berserker’s pact, the grove’s memory. A price is never just a number here; it’s a narrative by which a buyer and seller measure trust, risk, and the chance that a single, well-timed shot can alter the course of a night—and perhaps, in some small way, the fate of a road that winds through both danger and mercy.