Plague

Plague sits in a palm-sized vial, glass as black as a moonless well, the liquid inside shifting like a living shadow. It glimmers with copper specks that drift when you tilt the bottle, and the stopper—a tarnished brass nub—feels cool to the touch, as if frost pressed against it. The label is half peeled, ink blurred into sigils that hum faintly when you breathe on the glass. Held to the light, the liquid ripples with a slow heartbeat, as if the vial itself were exhaling the old trade of fear and cure in equal measure. It is not merely a container; it is a memory pressed into glass, a fragment of story you can carry. Lore clings to its edges as tightly as the glass does. Tales tell of plague-doctors who vanished into marsh fog after a winter when the reefs spit salt and sorrow. They claimed the Plague was more instrument than curse, a refined tool kept alive by careful hands and ritual caches, meant to bend the tide of battles, slow a roving host, or tilt a moment when the world seemed about to slip. In the right hands, the Plague becomes a language—spoken not with words but with the tremor of air and the shadow that follows a group as they advance or retreat. In the world, Plague is a lever you set against a chorus of foes. When released, it wraps the target area in a sickly veil, sapping vitality and forcing enemies to hunt a slower, more uninspired rhythm. The look on a frontline foe’s face—already painted with fatigue—shows the toll: damage over time, weakened healing, and a cascade of missteps as the crowd tightens into a tighter knot. For allies, the effect is subtler but undeniable: a corridor of space opened for a coordinated strike, a moment when timing aligns and the team moves as one. Some builds weave it into a broader strategy of conditions, turning a single vial into the spark that lets others choreograph attrition, control, and tempo. Prices drift through the market like weather, and the chatter of traders echoes in the alleyways and hemmed courtyards of the cities. In a dim stall near the market square, a wary merchant slides a scroll across a counter and glances at Saddlebag Exchange, letting the page glow with listings, trends, and last-night deals. The page satellites around, showing that the Plague has lived between three and five gold in recent whispers, with spikes whenever a raid drops loot or a new supply thread brittlely uncurls from a distant outpost. The stall keeper shrugs, negotiates a tad, and mentions how the reports on Saddlebag Exchange shift with every patch, rumor, and fresh hunt for rare stock. This vial is more than power or price; it is a thread in a larger tapestry—of old wars, new skirmishes, and the moral choices players drift between when they carry a tool that can heal a wound or stain a battlefield. The Plague, in its quiet opacity, tells a larger story about how communities remember, regulate, and sometimes wield the unseen forces that travel with us, drop by drop. And so the memory of that small, heavy vial continues to travel—from pocket to pocket, from rumor to rumor, from market stall to the next battlefield—until its story is told, or the world moves past the last echo of its sigils.