Carrion Steam Gizmo

The Carrion Steam Gizmo rests on the workbench, a compact contraption half brass, half bone-white enamel, its surfaces etched with tiny runes that catch a flicker of candlelight. The body is squat and spider-sleek, with rivets like beads along a hollow abdomen. A glass lens cap sits at the front, giving the thing the look of a watchful insect, and a small skull motif in iron is pressed into the hood where gears breathe. When you hold it, the metal is cool at first, then warms with a dry, mechanical heartbeat that tick-ticks in a quiet rhythm. A vent along the side sighs out pale steam whenever the gizmo stirs, and a leather strap is slung with practiced ease so it can ride on a belt or a satchel strap, always within reach. The lore is a map of whispers. Some say it was forged in a cellar beneath a plague-battered city, where tinkerers traded recipes for resilience, turning carrion into fuel and fear into a kind of weaponized comfort. Others insist it came from a caravan of necromancer-merchants who wanted to coax life from rust and bone, a mercenary’s charm that could bait a crowd or calm a rattle of ghosts in the lungs of a ruined engine. The truth, as with so many strange things, is a braid of both: a device born of desperation, then tempered by time and a few patient hands. In the field, the Carrion Steam Gizmo has a plain-speaking practicality that makes the world feel smaller and more navigable. When activated, it exhales a slow plume of mineral-scented steam that fogs the air and reveals hidden seams in walls and crates, a trick that has saved my compass and my skin more than once. It can distract a guard long enough to slip by or, if you’re careful with your timing, switch the tempo of a fight by pushing the steam toward the back line. Some keep it loaded with a little lantern oil and a pinch of resin to coax a brighter ash, others simply use it to keep a camping party warm on a frost-wet night. It’s not flashy, but it’s stubborn and dependable, the kind of gadget you stitch into a larger plan rather than rely on as the sole ace. The market, too, has a memory for it. I learned to price my own copy by listening to the whispers at Saddlebag Exchange, where veterans haggle over patina and provenance as if they were coins themselves. A fair trade—not flashy, but honest—might land you a couple of coins, a pocketed map, and a promise that the gizmo will be part of a longer story you tell on the road. In that way, the Carrion Steam Gizmo becomes less a thing and more a thread in a living tapestry, a note passed between traders, ruins, and the next expedition into the hollowed edge of the world. That rumor sits in your palm, waiting for the next road and story to begin.