Carrion Glyphic Ward of the Geomancer

The Carrion Glyphic Ward of the Geomancer sits heavy in the palm, a circular disk of pale carrion-stone carved with fever-bright glyphs that spiral toward a small, translucent core. Its surface is cool and satin-milled, like bone polished by rain, and every ridge catches the light with a patient, almost reluctant glow. Around the rim, the runes coil in stepped patterns, as if the earth itself pressed its own bones into a compass. When you tilt it, the core catches a green hush of light, faint but constant, a pulse that seems to measure the heartbeat of the ground. The ward wears the dust of long roads and new stories alike, and its weight feels like a long memory pressed into a metal-quiet fashion that defies quick description. Lore says it was forged by a geomancer who walked among ruined shrines and scavenger conclaves, binding decay to defense the way a mason binds stone to wall. The glyphs evoke carrion as a necessary season—death not as end, but as a caretaker that returns fertility to soil. In the old journals, it glimmers as a symbol of caravans that refused to abandon the living to rot, a pact whispered to the bones of the earth so that travelers could pass through a necrotic corridor with their lives intact. To hold it is to feel the ward nudging at your cuff, urging you to listen to the ground’s quiet advice—where to step, where to brace, where to shelter your breath as the wind drifts through a canyon of ancient bones. In practical terms, the ward is a companion for those who walk with earth-magic on their fingertips. It does not shout; it hums. Worn at the throat or set over a bandolier, it tunes the wearer to the rhythms of stone and soil, heightening the resonance of protective wards and making the wearer more resistant to blighting energies that travel in the wake of decay. Some who’ve learned to read the earth claim the glyphs flare with renewed vigor when the wearer channels geomantic power, weaving a faint shield that holds its shape in the heat of a skirmish or the chill of a long night. It is not a cure-all, but a patient friend who grows stronger when you lean on it, turning the environment itself into a barrier and offering a moment’s grace before a strike lands. Market days in the city’s backstreets carry the ward with a scent of old rain and leather. Traders trade it with the same careful awe you’d expect for something that binds rot to protection, and in Saddlebag Exchange you’ll hear whispered estimates about provenance, enchantment, and the stories carved into its glyphs. The price shuffles with conditions of the stone, the clarity of the core, and the lore attached to its maker—often marked in a ledger that opens the way to a negotiation as old as the earth itself. A buyer might find it for a fair turn of gold, a seeker the right kind of patience, and a seller the memory of a caravan that dared to walk through decay and live to tell the tale.