Carrion Steam Rifle

The Carrion Steam Rifle sits on a damp bench like a relic that has learned to breathe again: a long brass barrel etched with bone-white runes, its stock carved from scavenged carrion bone that’s darkened to a polish of decades’ worth of grime and rain. The surface swirls with a lacquer that catches the light in dull gold halos, while a glass canister near the breech shivers with a sickly-green glow, as if harboring a captured storm. Tiny vents along the fore-end hiss with a temperamental steam that rises in pale wisps, and a rusted iron sight rests crookedly atop the barrel, as if it has seen more close calls than most blades have seen dawns. In hand, the weapon feels paradoxically heavy and intimate, the balance warped by its living metal—almost as if the rifle remembers the life it once fed on before it learned to feed on bullets and breath alike. Lore has always whispered that such machines were born where the living dead and the living mind met in a fever dream: a caravan of artificers who believed that carrion rot’s slow, patient decay could be coaxed into a weapon’s quiet efficiency. The rifle’s core hums with that idea—the condensate distilled from rot and steam, captured in that glass canister and coaxed into release with every trigger pull. When fired, the shot seems to carry a cold breath with it, as if the weapon draws from a vault of ailments and miseries kept long after the battlefield has forgotten them. It’s said to be a purely cruel kind of mercy: a bullet that wounds armor with practiced precision and then sows a lingering illness in its wake, giving allies a window to press the advantage and enemies a slow, creeping reminder of mortality. In practical terms, the Carrion Steam Rifle has a rhythm all its own. It rewards patience and positioning: patient marksmen who learn to time their shots with the soft roll of fog over a ruined quay will watch the rifle’s second effect spread through crowded lines, neutralizing shields and turning bunched enemies into a stream of easy targets for others. Its range favors the careful—peel away the first layer of resistance, and the steam-born toxin lingers like a low fog that teammates can walk into, leveraging the battlefield into a more favorable topology. It’s a weapon for a world where every skirmish feels like a page torn from a larger tale, a page where one well-placed burst can tilt a street fight toward the quiet certainty of victory. Market stories thread through its history as well. A hunter of relics once traded a medley of salvaged sigils for a chance to test this rifle in the open air of a wind-swept market lane. The transaction found its way to Saddlebag Exchange, a roving nexus where traders bartered with candied resin, chipped runes, and stories. There, the Carrion Steam Rifle was weighed against whispered estimates of risk and potential, traded for a price that reflected its age and promise—a number not as important as the nod of recognition it earned from seasoned buyers who understood the item’s weight in a world that cannot afford to waste a single moment of advantage. As you cradle it and look out over a quiet street that’s just waking, the Carrion Steam Rifle feels less like a tool and more like a thread in a larger tapestry—the kind of artifact that makes a world feel real enough to live in, dangerous enough that every decision should be weighed, and oddly, compelling enough to want to see what comes next in the story it keeps telling.