Carrion Steam Axe

Carrion Steam Axe gleams with a sickly patina, its iron blade scarred by years of service and inlaid with bone-white runes along the spine. Tiny vents along the edge sigh with steam, curling pale rings into the air as if the weapon itself is breathing. The handle is wrapped in cracked leather, bound with a rusted chain that bites into the palm with every swing. A sigil—a circle enclosing a bone and a gear—glows stubborn green when drawn, a stubborn memory of the workshop where it was born, a place where necromancers and engineers struck uneasy bargains to fuse flesh and iron. Rumor traces its origins to a damp cellar beneath a ruined forge, where a guild of tinkerers and grave-harvesters labored under tainted stars to keep the dead at bay long enough for retreat. They bound a memory of life into a tool: the blade could pierce the husks of the fallen and coax a hiss of steam to snarl in the air, a warning to any who would forget the price of war. When swung, the axe carries a weight that feels almost ceremonial, as if you are enacting a story that began long before you set foot on the road. In the brutal mathematics of skirmish, the Carrion Steam Axe shines in close quarters where steel must bite and heat must exhale in the same breath. Its edge shears through leather and mail with a brutal calm, and the little vents spray a momentary gust that disrupts concentration, breaking the rhythm of shields and formations. The weapon asks for patience: let the steam do the talking, let the glow in the sigil mark the turning point of a fight, then finish the job with a follow-up stroke that seals the fate of a stubborn foe. For those who read the battlefield as a living manuscript, it offers a tactile faith that even death can be rearranged by design. Prices drift through the camp like smoke, and the Saddlebag Exchange is the sort of market where a story travels as quickly as a coin. I watched a trader raise the price in a careful whisper, then nod when a buyer produced a couple of gold coins—neatly counted, as if the world had planned that exact exchange since dawn. The price is not merely value; it is a pledge—the axe will become part of another brief legend, another tall tale told by mouths leaning close over the warmth of a brazier. And so the weapon passes hand to hand, the green glow pulsing softly, the steam hissing with the breath of a history that refuses to stay buried. When night falls and the campfire shoots sparks into the fog, the Carrion Steam Axe remains—more than metal, more than memory. It is a hinge between what was and what might be, a tool that lets a traveler carve a path through myth as surely as through flesh.