Cleric's Soft Wood Longbow of Debility

Cleric's Soft Wood Longbow of Debility sits on a sunlit table, its grain pale and almost shy, as if the forest itself leaned in to listen. The limbs are slender, carved from a timber so soft to the touch that a careful finger can press a crease into it and the wood will return to its gentle curve as if nothing happened. The finish is a matte honey, catching light in a way that makes the bow look as though it breathes, slow and steady. The grip is wrapped in worn linen ribbon, frayed at the edges, with copper sigils stitched along the seam in a pattern that resembles a patient, beaded heartbeat. Across the belly of the wood, a line of runes glows faintly—green as new moss, not bright enough to shout, but persistent enough to insist on attention. The Debility sigil, small and careful, threads along the grip like a whispered reminder: power given, power restrained. It’s a weapon with a paradox stitched into its history. Local lore says a cleric-archer once walked the shadowed alleys of a city that forgot its mercy, trading healing prayers for the courage to stand against corruption. In that service, the bow learned to borrow a fraction of an enemy’s strength—swift, precise, almost clinical—so that the healer’s own community could endure longer, weathering the blight that fed on weakness. The wood remembers the chill of caves and the heat of sunlit plazas, the scent of resin and rain, and the patient press of a hand steadying a trembling target. If you listen carefully, the bow seems to murmur about restraint: the skill to strike for a purpose, not for vanity; the restraint to leave a life unruled by vanity, even in victory. In practical terms, its role on the battlefield is clear enough to a seasoned eye. When an arrow leaves the string, it does more than wound. It carries a flicker of Debility, a careful reduction of a foe’s immediate vigor that lingers for a few breathes, softening their resolve, widening the window for allies to press forward, to sow distraction, to heal what was once in danger of breaking. It’s not a weapon built for brute force; it is a collaborator, designed for moments when mercy must be measured and timing must be exact. In a quartet of fighters, it can orchestrate a pause—a moment when healer, support, and striker find the same tempo and move as one. The market breathes around it, too, and the Saddlebag Exchange is the scene of its latest negotiation. A trader murmured a number, and the courtyard hushed a little as coins clinked and shadows shifted. The going rate, he suggested, hovered between twelve and sixteen silver, depending on who carried the bow away and how many stories the buyer could tell about mercy or stubborn resolve. The bow’s story feeds the exchange as much as the exchange feeds the bow; both are portals, one to memory and one to possibility. So the Cleric’s Soft Wood Longbow of Debility endures not simply as a tool, but as a thread in a larger tapestry of mercy and consequence. It asks its wielder to weigh strength against restraint, to read a battlefield not only in terms of numbers but in the quiet arithmetic of courage, and to keep faith with a past that taught that to heal well, one must know where to lay one’s power down.