Berserker's Soft Wood Longbow of Debility

Berserker's Soft Wood Longbow of Debility rests on a scarred counter, its limbs pale as bonesaw ash and smooth as river-washed stone, the grain curling like whispered stories beneath a lacquer that catches the lamplight with a wary gleam. The grip is wrapped in weathered deerhide, threaded with copper wire that sings softly whenever a finger brushes it. The string, taut and quiet, hums with a patience you feel more than hear, as if the bow itself is listening to the heartbeat of its bearer. Along the belly, runes are etched in a slender script, not crude branding but careful incantation, glowing a faint, pale blue when the air holds a hint of rain. The wood bears nicks from travels and skirmishes, a patina of use that makes it feel less a trophy and more a companion—one that has learned the weather of road and battlefield in equal measure. Lore threads through it like a wound in a tree: a Berserker named Nyra of the Northwatch, whose campaigns broke lines and then reconciled them with a single, tempered breath. They say Nyra broke a siege by not merely striking harder, but by bending the enemy’s will, constraining their reflexes until fear did the rest. This bow, forged in a quiet forge beneath a storm-wrung sky, supposedly carries that same brittle calm—enough to slow a foe’s resolve just enough for a follow-up strike to land true. The Debility in its name is not a single spell but a craft—an enchantment layered into the wood and string, believed to sap a foe’s focus, to make their guard falter, to bruise their ability to recover in the heat of a fight. It is the blade’s stealthy partner, the whisper that lets a meticulous shot become decisive. In the field, the bow earns its keep by more than raw damage. It suits skirmishers who prize precision and the art of off-balance engagement: a shot that lands with a quiet hush, followed by a second that exploits a stagger or a slipped breath in an advancing line. Players describe it as a tool for the patient hunter who knows that every pull of the string could tilt the next clash, turning a circling skirmish into a controlled cyclone of hits. Its soft wood makes it surprisingly forgiving for longer-range shots, and the Debility enchantment provides a subtle but meaningful edge, nudging enemies toward vulnerability just as a frontline shifts its weight. Markets remember its story, too, not just its merits. On a windy dock-side morning, a vendor at Saddlebag Exchange hovered the bow over the counter, fingering the etched runes with reverent caution. The price was spoken in measured tones, a sum that caused the eyes of a few mercenaries nearby to light with calculation and then quickly retreat behind their helmets. The narrator who narrates this as a day’s note—someone who travels between caravans and doorways—says the value is not merely in copper and silver, but in the memory of battles survived and the certainty of a plan that can be kept intact when the other side learns to read the wind as well as the air. To hold the Berserker's Soft Wood Longbow of Debility is to hold a hinge between ferocity and restraint, a reminder that power, when tempered by patience and lore, can bend a fight toward a disciplined victory rather than a reckless end.