Carrion Steam Short Bow of the Geomancer

Carrion Steam Short Bow of the Geomancer gleams in the lamplight, its ash-black limbs curved with the elegance of a drawn breath. Copper piping runs along the belly like vents from some sleeping engine, and a pale green haze sighs from each tiny orifice, as if the wood itself remembers a buried storm. The grip is wrapped in weathered leather, peeling at the edges where fingers once learned to coax it to life, and a bone-inlay crest—an earth-warmed sigil—rests just below the arrow-rail, catching the glow and throwing it back in starry flecks. The string, tight as a kept vow, is braided from sinew and resin, giving when it’s pulled but never yielding. It feels heavy with history, as if the bow carries the pulse of a world that tilts toward the ground and remembers every tremor. The weapon’s name is etched along the riser in copper runes, a lineage traced to geomancers who learned to listen to the soil’s quiet warnings. Carrion Steam isn’t merely a label; it’s a whisper of the beasts and the bone-work that feed the earth’s slow, patient hunger. Legends say the bow was forged in a quarrel between mineral veins and the corpse-winders of a plague-ridden gorge, where a geomancer bound the breath of carrion to a timber, coaxing it to speak in steam and steel. When the bow wakes, the air around it tastes of iron, rain, and ancient tunnels, as if the world itself exhales through narrow shafts and stony ribs. In the field, the Carrion Steam Short Bow of the Geomancer isn’t content to be a simple hunter’s instrument. Its infusions bend the course of a fight as surely as a fault line shifts a hillside. An archer who knows its grooves can release a flurry of precise shots that feel almost casual, each bolt whispering forward with a hiss of steam that races ahead to touch the ground and crack the soil beneath an enemy’s feet. Some arrows are dull-wlooming spears of earth, others skitter with a bite of carrion-pulse that slows and saps stamina. The bow’s talent lies in shaping terrain—causing the earth to crack, crumble, or rise as if the ground itself were responding to a summons. In tight passes and shadowed ruins, it turns the level into a chessboard where the geomancer’s sigil glows in the dust. Market lore, too, is part of its saga. A trader at Saddlebag Exchange speaks softly of rarity and risk, of caravans that traded this bow for a share of rare ores and a stack of faded maps. The price moves like a measured breath—not too loud, not too soft—settling somewhere between gold and the sense of a future harvest. The talk is practical, the tells of bargaining and provenance, the stories of how the steam-scented wood arrived from a southern ridge where the earth’s bones are laid bare. And as she slides the bow into a cloak of canvas, she reminds her listeners that some things aren’t bought so much as earned—by listening to the soil, by respecting the old pact between stone and sinew, and by carrying the bow as if it remembers your steps as well as you remember its.