Carrion Steam Rifle of the Geomancer

Carrion Steam Rifle of the Geomancer rests on a scarred wooden workbench, its ash-gray stock carved with sinewy patterns that resemble roots twisting through stone. The metal gleams in patches—brass where the casing has seen sun, iron where it has known rain—while rivets glint like tiny coins left by long-vanished caravan guards. The barrel wears a coppery bloom from countless heat cycles, and along the receiver runes curl in a slow, patient script that seems to pulse with a faint, greenish glow when you pull the oil-slick trigger. A strip of bone, curved and polished by hands both careful and rough, marks the underside, as if the Geomancer’s own tether to earth and decay were pressed into the weapon’s very backbone. It smells of rain-washed soil and something heavier—carrion—an echo of rot kept at bay by steam and discipline. The weapon’s lore threads through the stall-lit market more than any other relic, as if its history could be read in the way the brass catches the light. They say a geomancer of the old earth-wardens carved it in a temple half-swallowed by basalt. When the temple’s wards wavered, he bound to the rifle a field of tremors and decay, making each shot a tiny earthquake that unsettled enemies and unsettled their breath. The essence of carrion—its stubborn, living decay—was coaxed into the cartridge, so a shot does more than sting: it unsettles the ground beneath patrols, shakes loose hidden nerves in the rock, and leaves a creeping odor of old wounds in the air. It’s not just firepower; it’s a story pressed into metal—warfare as geology, a battlefield rewritten with dirt, bone, and steam. In practice, the Carrion Steam Rifle of the Geomancer feels like an argument you can fire at a column of foes. A single round drapes the target in a bloom of steam that meters distance and then detonates with a staggered release, sending a low, rolling tremor through the ground that can stagger skirmishes and fracture lines in a wall of enemies. Its true strength, to the eyes of a battlefield observer, lies in control—timed shots that ripple outward, a stuttering pulse of earth that disrupts formations and creates pockets for ambush or retreat. Strategic minds once whispered that it’s best paired with a necromancer’s tether or a ranger’s careful lines; the tremor can expose choke points, while the carrion residue squads into bleeding stacks that favor conditions over raw, blunt force. It’s a weapon that encourages planning, a tool that invites a slow, patient art of war rather than a reckless rush. Pricing, as any seasoned trader will tell you, is a dance as delicate as the gun’s own balance. I watched the vendor threads unwind at Saddlebag Exchange, where a seasoned broker named Lira weighed the gun against a pouch of scrimshaw coins and several brittle maps. The tag swung between three and four gold, depending on how the caravan’s mood ran that week and how much dust clung to the stock. We haggle gently, trading stories of old sieges and new routes, until a price feels less like a number and more like a compact—an agreement that the weapon will be carried into the next desert, the next canyon, the next rain-soaked ruin. In that exchange you sense something larger: that this rifle isn’t merely gear, but a hinge—between earth and rot, between old magic and new steel, between one traveler’s memory and the next world’s fight. So it sits, imposing and patient, carving its own quiet path through the world it was built to disturb—an artifact that turns the ground beneath heroes into something more than dirt, something that remembers, and that insists on being used with intent.