Cleric's Iron Rifle of Corruption

Cleric's Iron Rifle of Corruption rests on the workbench, a midnight tube of iron that seems to drink the lamplight rather than reflect it. Its barrel is a seamless charcoal spear of metal, etched with runes so fine they look like hairline cracks in a dark mirror. The stock is carved from a deep, weather-beaten wood whose grain runs like river maps, stained by years of rain and oathsworn duties; brass bands grip the fore-end and the receiver, catching a glint of amber on every edge. Along the side, the sigils—antique prayers retouched by hands long gone—trace a story of protection and temptation, and when the torchlight skims them, they glow with a pale, almost sickly green that seems to murmur a warning. The grip feels cool and deliberate, as if the weapon itself takes a measure of your heartbeat before it answers. If you cradle it close, you can almost hear the whispers of clerics who believed that sanctity could be tempered with iron, that light might be sharpened into a weapon without losing its mercy. In the field, the rifle is less an instrument of show than a patient partner in a dangerous ritual. Its shots bite with a grave precision, piercing wind and smoke to land where it matters most, and the corruption it carries lingers like a shadow that refuses to quit. Targets marked by its shot move slower, their responses dulled as if the very life in them were being siphoned through the barrel’s cold mouth. It doesn’t blaze and scatter the room in a moment; it threads through the fray with a measured breath, forcing a confrontation to tilt toward the bearer’s advantage. Veterans tell you to respect its pace: fire, then wait for the lingering bite of the corruption to take hold, fuel for the next exchange. It rewards discipline, not bravado, and punishes the careless with a recoil that feels almost personal, as though the gun remembers every misstep you let slip in your last campaign. The weapon has an aging aura that makes it feel like a chapter in a larger, ongoing saga. It has traveled with caravans teaching border skirmishes and quiet, uneasy truces, appearing when a settlement needed a signal flare more than a sword. Its presence has shifted the balance in small but consequential ways—an ambush on a corrupted march turning into a retreat when the rifle’s voice cut cleanly through the fog, a healer’s breath catching as the corruption’s spread stuttered in the gun’s wake. It’s the kind of relic that invites stories, the kind that binds a town’s memory to a blade more than any plaque ever could. Prices drift in the rumor mill the way smoke drifts through a doorway, but I watched it move through Saddlebag Exchange with a wary arithmetic and a steady curiosity. A stallholder and a buyer circled one another with smiles that never quite reached their eyes, trading not just coins but a shared sense of the rifle’s weight in the world. A few gold coins, a couple of rare components, a story or two in exchange for a weapon that felt larger than its maker’s hands. That is theOdd bargain of relics like this: value shifts with the telling, and the Cleric’s Iron Rifle of Corruption endures, a tool and a tale, waiting for the next chapter to begin.