Eir's Longbow

Eir's Longbow catches the first frost-light of dawn: a bow of pale ash, its limbs carved into delicate veining that resembles broken ice, the grip wrapped in aged leather the color of honeyed bone, and runes etched along the belly that glimmer with a soft, silvery glow. The string, a thin thread of frozen sun, hums faintly whenever the bow is drawn, as if a sigh passes along the wood before the arrow takes flight. The nocks are inlaid with tiny teardrops of blue resin, catching light and throwing back the world in a dozen pale reflections. It feels almost alive in the hand, as if it remembers every field it’s crossed, every oath kept by its bearer. Legends whisper that Eir herself blessed this weapon at the moment of its forging, a healer’s mercy bound into a weapon where mercy and menace share the same arc. When you draw it, the air around you seems to lean closer, listening for a wounded cry and answering with a quiet, measured tremor that travels along the arrow’s shaft before it leaves the bowstring. In the field, it is a long-range companion that prefers patience to blaze, rewarding the careful ranger who studies a foe rather than simply flings the projectile into the fray. Its shot arcs with a crystalline whisper and lands with a hush that feels like snowfall on armor; the runes glow a little brighter after a hit, as if the bow itself is tallying the lives saved and the battles endured. To hold Eir’s Longbow is to feel the weight of a larger story—one that straddles the border between wilderness and town, between the oath to protect and the lure of distant horizons. It is prized not just for its beauty but for the way it blends with a healer’s ideal of restraint: a lethal instrument that chooses to wait, to connect, to defend. Players who embrace it find that in the right hands the weapon becomes less about raw damage and more about shifting the battlefield’s rhythm—pacing shots to puncture a foe’s focus, enabling an ally to slip free, and guiding the party’s momentum as if steering a shoreline’s tide. The market in which such a piece travels is a quiet, well-worn path, and it’s easy to hear the muffled clack of coin on coin when a buyer and seller meet. I watched a quiet negotiation unfold at Saddlebag Exchange, where a clerk with ink-stained fingers weighed the bow against a handful of glimmering coins. The price offered hovered in the comfortable range for a weapon of legend—enough to savor the memory, enough to tempt the next wanderer into a bargain that still leaves a lingering ache for what was left behind. The sale was as much a transfer of memory as of metal, a passing of the flame from one story to the next, and somewhere in the back room a map shifted slightly, hinting at new routes and old debts carried on with the wind.