Carrion Steam Mace of Agony rests on a scarred worktable, its head a dark, almost bruised disk of iron, hammered into concentric rings that catch the lamplight with a dull, stubborn gleam. Along the spine runs a line of bone inlays—fossilized with a green patina from long hours of combustion—and from its throat vents a pale green steam sighs, curling toward the ceiling like a whisper of something once living. The handle is wrapped in weather-worn leather that bears the imprint of countless trades and journeys, brass fittings slick with oil and old blood, the whole thing giving off a faint mechanical heartbeat, as if the thing itself were listening as much as it was striking. If you tilt your head just so, you can almost hear the hiss of its hidden engine, a furnace-rattle that sounds like a distant memory of a battlefield where the living and the dead both felt the world tilt. Lore, in this city of merchants and mausoleums, clings to its edges. They say the Carrion Steam Mace was forged in a cellar beneath a plague-wracked quarter, where a smith learned to coax heat from bone and rot from iron. They say the sigils etched into the bone are not mere decoration but a failed glimmer of mercy—an attempt to bind the sufferings of those felled in siege and skirmish into a weapon that could be wielded without dissolving the wielder’s own soul. The steam that escapes when the mace is swung is said to carry the memory of every anguished scream it ever tasted, a reminder that power in this world rarely travels alone; it comes carrying a price, a pact as old as the stones in the city’s harbor. In the hands, the mace becomes a conversation between metal and spirit. A single swing lands with earth-splitting weight, and the air around the strike thickens as if the room itself drew a breath of pain. Each contact with armor-bound foes seems to etch a new layer of agony on the target, a stacking burden that bleeds away at their resolve and their vitality. It is not simply about raw force; it is about turning a battlefield into a ledger where every blow records a debt. For those who invest in the right partnerships—scarred engineers who understand pressure, necromancers who coax the subtle shadows of weakness from the living—this weapon becomes more than a blade. It becomes a catalyst for coordinated damage, a focal point where crowd control, lingering damage, and burst strikes align in a single, merciless melody. Market whispers give the item a walking shadow in the wider world. A trader at Saddlebag Exchange might lay the mace out on a velvet cloth, letting the coins clink while he talks of risk, of buyers who chase rarity, of the sudden blight in prices when a rumor travels faster than a caravan. The price moves with the wind and the mood of the market, sometimes hovering in the higher ranges for weeks, other times dipping when another relic captures the crowd’s imagination. It is a temptation that glimmers—an invitation to harness pain into purpose—but only for those who can bear the weight of the memory it carries. So the Carrion Steam Mace of Agony sits in its niche, half art, half weapon, a relic that whispers of ruin and resilience in equal measure. In the right hands, it becomes a key, turning the past into a precise, devastating present, and perhaps, just perhaps, guiding a path toward a future where every strike has a story.