Honed Soft Wood Short Bow of Leeching

The Honed Soft Wood Short Bow of Leeching lies across the table, a slender arc of pale timber polished to a satin sheen, its grain like slow river currents run through honey. The limbs are light as whispers, yet springy with a confidence earned from patient wedges and careful heat; the grip is wrapped in tired leather that smells faintly of rain and old campfires. A narrow strip of resin glows along the belly, catching the glimmer of the lamp and throwing a pale, almost clinical warmth back at you. Inlaid along the riser are diminutive sigils, a winding line of runes that blink whenever the bow is drawn—nothing flashy, just a patient reminder that this weapon has learned patience as well as precision. It carries a scent of cedar and something old, a memory of forests that survived the world’s long, quiet tests. Some say the soft wood is kin to trees that grew where fog and wind shared a single breath, and that the bow’s lips remember every hunter who pressed it against a shield and a heartbeat. If you cradle it, the bow feels like a story asking to be finished rather than a tool simply to be used. When you notch an arrow and draw, the Leeching enchantment gives back a fraction of the life you take in a way that isn’t boastful but essential—a trade where vitality flows from the fallen to the living, a quiet exchange that lets a hunter stay in the field longer, remain in the chase, and keep pace with a world that loves to surprise you from behind a hill or a fern. It’s not merely a weapon of precision; it’s a partner in the long, patient work of surviving the day’s currents. In the heat of a skirmish, you can feel the wood’s old vow—to give as little as needed, to take as little for granted, and to remind you that every wound saved is a little life earned back. In the wider world, this bow has traveled with caravans and guard shifts, slipping from one hand to another in the bustle of markets and river crossings. Its true worth isn’t only in how straight its arrows fly, but in the stories it carries—the hunter who used it to defend a moonlit village from raiders, the scout who learned to trust its patience when dawn broke across a misty valley, the trader who swapped a child’s toy for it and promised it would teach a new kind of restraint to a reckless market crew. It feels part of a larger, slower epic about people who live by listening for a distant click of a bowstring and choosing to answer with care. Prices drift through the market like autumn leaves, and you hear whispers of Saddlebag Exchange, where the bow’s glow and its lore are weighed against coin and favor. A clerk might tell you it’s priced as a rare find for the right hunter—a few silver, perhaps, a handful of copper more or less, depending on demand and the bow’s recent history. The exchange floor hums with that particular rhythm of trade: stories first, then steel, always a little luck tossed in with the coins. And if you listen closely, you’ll hear an old oak’s breath: the soft wood remembers, and the Leeching bow remembers back.