Carrion Verdant Trident of Corruption

The Carrion Verdant Trident of Corruption gleams with a sickly, oily green as if a swamp had learned to breathe through iron. The shaft is carved from a driftwood-dark wood, mottled with a verdigris patina that crawls along grain like creeping vines. Three prongs rise from the head in a skeletal fan, each tine fluted and jagged, as if the sea itself chewed on bone and left a glimmering green lacquer behind. The grip is wrapped in aged leather, half-rotted and slick with a resin that smells faintly of kelp and decay. Along the haft run thin runes of a language few remember, etched in a feverish coppery line that catches the light and seems to pulse when the air grows thick with rot. The whole thing hums with a quiet, unnatural vitality—a relic that looks less a weapon and more a conduit for a stubborn forest’s stubborn hunger. Lore says it was forged in the shadow of a crash-landing plague—an artifact torn from a green-tinged cult that believed corruption could be coaxed into growth. They wove carrion sigils into the wood and coaxed sap to harden into a verdant armor around the trident’s spine. Some claim the trident’s verdant core once housed a sprouting seed of an ancient grove, a seed that refuses to die even when the earth around it has. If you listen at the right hour, you can hear a faint, carrion-sweet whisper when you hold it up to your ear—like a chorus of drowned roots, speaking in a language that promises both feast and famine. In the world outside the myth, the trident answers a grim, practical question: what happens when life and rot trade favors on the battlefield? Carrion Verdant Trident of Corruption is not merely a showpiece; it legitimizes a play with soil and blood. A strike from its prongs feels like a pinch of decay that lingers on steel and skin, a slow burn that enables allied forces to press advantage when the enemy’s guard falters. It spreads a poignant aura—the sort that twists the battlefield into a living, breathing garden of hazard. Patches of rot cling to armor, and small pockets of corruption creep along the ground, inviting allies to stand in its shadow and harvest the destabilized momentum. It’s the kind of weapon that threads a larger story: rot as resource, decay as tactic, and the forest’s stubborn will as a battalion behind you. Prices, of course, drift like autumn leaves, and traders know to weigh more than coins. I heard the tale told by a weathered shopkeep at Saddlebag Exchange, where brass scales click and old maps curl at the edges. The trident, he said, was not just metal and poison but a ledger of deeds—worth gold, yes, but also a tale, a risk, a promise. A buyer would trade carefully: perhaps three fragments of rare moss, a skittering charm from a charr-in-scarred city, and a modest sum of gold that conceals a larger debt to the market’s hidden watchers. The exchange felt almost ceremonial, the way the trident’s glow flickered in the lamplight as if approving the next chapter of the world’s slow, green corrosion. Some nights, I wonder who will walk away with it—the scholar who seeks to understand its seed-born truth, the marauder who wants to bend rot into an ally, or the wardens who hope to seal the grove’s hunger forever. For now, the Carrion Verdant Trident of Corruption remains a living riddle, its green pulse guiding the story forward, one strike, one scent of sap and rot, one whispered vow at a time.