Carrion Steam Brand

The Carrion Steam Brand sits cold in the palm, a loop of iron bound with damp brass, a small glass vial set into its core that gleams with a sickly green light. Steam leaks from a seam along the spine, hissing like breath from a buried engine, and the runes etched along its length curl in on themselves, as if the metal remembers every cart that ever carried it into plague-haunted streets. It was forged not for ceremony but for necessity, say the old storytellers who trade in rumor as readily as metal: a necromancer who wired carrion ritual to a riveted steam contraption, a device meant to mark the living so the dead could follow with a more practical map. The texture is irregular under the fingers, a rough blend of hammered iron and charred wood, with rivets that bite at the skin and a burnished edge that remembers a forge’s last hot breath. In the grip, the item feels like a hinge between two centuries—the age of bone-bound sigils and the age of wheeled engines—and you sense it has traveled with more than its share of danger. It isn’t merely decorative; it’s designed to partner with a fighter’s rhythm, to turn a throw of the wrist into a sentence of consequence. When the Carrion Steam Brand finds its mark, a pale emerald mist ghosts from its core and clings to the target, a Carrion Mark that lingers like a rumor in the air. The mark tugs at the edge of their defenses, nudging nearby allies to press their advantages, and feeding your own power in small, steady increments. It doesn’t explode your numbers in a single moment, but it invites a story-driven crescendo: you begin as a scavenger and end as someone who can harvest opportunity from a battlefield’s discord. The lore behind it threads through ruins and caravan camps alike. Elders whisper of a workshop where necromancers collaborated with tinkers, binding carrion rites to steamtech in a desperate bid to outpace a creeping plague. Those who carry the Brand carry a reminder that the world is stitched from contradiction—death and invention, rot and resilience—woven together into tools that can save a life or condemn a city to memory. Market chatter around such relics rarely stays quiet for long, and Saddlebag Exchange is a particular echo chamber for these kinds of bargains. I watched a stallkeeper cradle the Brand as if it were a sleeping creature, tracing the glass with a gloved finger and muttering that the right buyer would coax it into a legend. The price tag swung with the crowd’s mood, settling around two gold coins plus a handful of silver, a figure that could rise or fall with a whispered rumor of a necromancer who might reclaim its true owner’s debt or a hunter who could coax it to sing in a new build. In the end, the Brand’s value isn’t merely currency; it’s a doorway to chapters you’ll write on the battlefield, a reminder that even steam can be bent toward the slow, patient work of survival. Holding it, you feel the centuries—steam and carrion, iron and bone—collapse into a singular moment, and the story you tell next might just hinge on the flicker of that sickly green light.