Gift of Souls

Gift of Souls rests in the palm of a gloved hand: a teardrop of tempered glass, pale as dawn ash, its surface a quiet lacquer that catches lamplight and scatters it into micro-galaxies. Inside, motes drift and circle like tiny silhouettes, each one a soft echo of a life once lived. The texture is cool and slightly granular, almost like the surface of a coin minted from moonlight, and when you rub your thumb along the edge you can feel a whisper-thin seam where the glass was pressed and cooled just so. Elders speak of it as a fragment spun from a pact among shade-weavers, a memory bottled and sealed with a whispered vow. To hold it is to hear a name called softly, and to answer is to listen for the next request the world will thread through your days. In the field, the Gift moves between stories and hands with a patient inevitability. Crafters claim it can be bound to a weapon or piece of armor, awakening a latent resonance that shifts a fight into a tone you hadn’t planned—the moment when iron sings instead of clashes, when a shield seems to remember a greater duty. Adventurers use it to grease the gears of a ritual: place the orb upon a sigil, chant a line from an old ledger, and the glow deepens, giving a temporary edge to a long night’s patrol or a sudden push through a contested zone. It is said that the souls inside yearn to be released in service, so the Gift is treated with care, never wasted, always earned through quiet perseverance. Markets tell their own small myths about it too: some say a bundle of these orbs once turned the tide of a siege; others warn that the number of keepsake souls inside is finite, demanding respect and patience from any buyer. On a late afternoon at the market’s edge, I watch a trader tally a stack of gifts in a tray, the glass catching the fading sun and throwing back ghosts of other days. A courier glances toward the Saddlebag Exchange stall, where seasoned sellers post recent sale prices and buyer sentiment in neat, scrolling lines. The chatter is not loud but knowing: a Gift of Souls is not mere trinket; it is a promise, a memory, a key. Some days the price drifts with the wind, other days it tightens like a bowstring, and the crowd leans in to hear the latest anecdote from a veteran who swears one orb once guided a desperate caravan through a storm of ash and rumor. If you listen closely, you can hear the world asking for care, and the Gift answering, one quiet pulse at a time. Sometimes I think the Gift of Souls is less a possession than a ritual's memory, a mirror in glass. In the end, those who bear it learn to listen more closely, not for power alone but for the world’s soft, lingering invitations—to carry, to release, to remember.