Carrion Steam Short Bow

Carrion Steam Short Bow glints under lamplight, its limbs of deep-smoked wood strung with something that betrays both craft and encounter. The stock is wrapped in worn leather that has the patina of many campaigns, the grain of the wood visible as if the bow were a map to some long-forgotten field. Along the belly, copper rivets catch tiny sapphirish glints, and a few teeth of bone are inlaid where the wind would cradle a shot. A small carrion-bird motif is carved into the grip, its wings splayed in a way that suggests a midflight capture, a reminder that nothing in the world of scavengers is wasted. Lore threads tangle as you hold it: a scavenger-turned-huntsman who learned to listen to the steam of old machines, who learned to coax life from rust and bone. They spoke of carrion birds circling ruined watchtowers, of steam vents venting like pensive lungs after a battle, and of fights won not by brutal force but by the patient turning of a lever and a well-placed shot. The bow was said to have absorbed those stories, the chill of the cemetery and the heat of the forge, binding them into a weapon that speaks when you draw—like a kettle warming just enough to remind you that danger is never far. In practice, the Carrion Steam Short Bow feels like a fast conversation with a dangerous partner. It rewards pace and precision, the kind of hunter who slips through alleys of stone and sinew. Arrows fly with a short, bright sigh, and the steam-wisp that trails them is more than mere theater: it disrupts, it unsettles, it hints at a trap waiting to spring. The bow suits skirmishers who bounce from shadow to shadow, layering pressure on a single target while the surrounding crowd grows wary of the strange, living vapor that clings to the air long after a shot has passed. Markets, of course, keep their own kind of weather. In the marketplace tents and shadowed stalls, the Carrion Steam Short Bow is a sought-after piece, traded with the same care you’d give a rumor you’ve decided to believe. Saddlebag Exchange is where patience meets appetite—lists flicker, sellers bargain, and a whisper of a trade travels from one district to the next. Some days it appears in a tidy bundle of leather and bone at a price that makes a ranger pause, other days it skitters into a corner of a collection, coveted by those who see the world as a web of chances. The value, as with the story itself, is not static: it shifts with season, with the metal’s glow under a dusk sky, with the echo of a successful ambush that leaves a legend trailing behind the next arrow. Holding it, you are no longer merely a hunter; you are a caretaker of a myth that breathes steam and carrion, and the hunt becomes a chapter of a larger, unending book. Its story travels on the wind as surely as its arrow travels through armor, inviting those who hear it to seek their own version of the truth.