Carrion Steamblade

The Carrion Steamblade glints with a pale blue light, its blade a sinuous ribbon of dark steel braided with copper and bone. Along the spine, tiny vents pucker like a beetle’s carapace, and tilt reveals faint channels where steam breathed. The grip is wrapped in weathered leather, tight as a knot, scarred with runes that glow faintly whenever the weapon stirs. In the guard a fragment of bone sits crookedly, a trophy from a long-forgotten hunter. It carries a scent of hot oil and damp earth, rain on rust, and things coaxed to life instead of rot. Locals tell a quieter legend: forged in a derelict furnace where necromancers bent damp steam to their will, the Carrion Steamblade drinks power from the living and the dead alike. It is said that the blade’s name honors those scavengers who fed a city’s industrial heart with carrion fuel—dead things transformed into motive force, into a machine that learns to bite back. The metal bears sigils of a cult that once whispered through the pipes, and every notch in its edge seems to cradle a rumor of betrayal and renewal. Touch it and you feel a chill that is not cold but busy, as if the weapon itself is listening for the next inhabitant of the nightmare factory it once served. In battle the blade is a swift partner for those who move with the pace of a rumor, not a march. It slices with a clean, merciless arc and leaves behind a veil of steam that ghosts across the air, dulling the senses of anyone who chases you into the mist. Its edge seems to crave targets that carry lingering damage, turning poison and burn into a compact dance that compounds with each strike. For a user who leans into condition damage, the Steamblade becomes less a weapon and more a conduit—an engine that translates rot, fever, and iron into momentum. Those who balance stealth and speed will tell you it feels almost alive, as if the blade itself is feeding on nearby life and spitting back a hotter, more precise strike. On a crowded market day, I watched a seller pull the blade from a dusty case, its leather scabbard worn smooth by hands that had closed around its grip more times than they could count. At Saddlebag Exchange the price tag was a rumor and a ledger—two gold coins’ worth of bravado, plus a handful of salvage, plus the stories worth more than the metal itself. Sometimes the price shifts like steam in a pipe, depending on who’s selling and who’s listening to the gossip about who last wore the blade and where that person vanished after the strike. In the end, the Carrion Steamblade feels less like a thing and more like a chronicle: a weapon that remembers decay and uses it to drive forward, a small engine of life-stealing elegance that you can carry, feel, and, if you dare, wield. It is a story etched in steel as much as in skin.