Rabid Soft Wood Focus

Rabid Soft Wood Focus rests in the palm, its surface warm and pale like a sap-glossed twig just out of a summer rain. The wood is soft to the touch, almost buoyant, with a honeyed grain that curls into a patient spiral. A small, snarling wolf head is carved on its face, eyes inlaid with amber and a hairline crack of red resin along the cheek that seems to pulse when you lean close. On the side, runes are etched in a meticulous spiral, the glyphs catching light and giving off a faint, coppery glow that never fully fades, as if the focus remembers every whisper it’s ever heard. The scent of fresh wood, resin, and something wilder lingers around it, like a forest that has learned to speak. lore threads braid through the object almost before you realize it’s a relic of stories more than a mere tool. They say the Rabid Soft Wood Focus was carved from a stump that survived a rabid winter of howls, when the wilds themselves seemed to tremble at the teeth of memory. The crafter, a woodworker who traded tales for amber, believed the tree absorbed fear and sharpened it into purpose. If you listen closely as you turn the wood between finger and thumb, you swear you can hear a low panting, the distant echo of a pack that once prowled the borders of a winter-sleeping village. The focus seems to be more than a vessel for magic; it feels like a conduit for the voice of something that ran with wolves and learned to bargain with the living. In gameplay terms, it’s an off-hand focus designed to heighten channeling and warding—an instrument for magnifying the wielder’s intent. When held, the focus seems to tighten the air around your hands, the runes pulsing along the grain to hint at improved focus and steadier breath. It doesn’t bend reality by itself, but it lends a certain clarity to the spellwork that threads through your builds. Those who work with it describe a quiet vigilance—the sense that every syllable spoken in chants, every glyph traced into a sigil, is sharpened as if the wood itself wants the world to listen. In quiet moments between skirmishes, the focus often glows a little brighter, as if recalling a tale told too many times and choosing to tell it again, only with a new audience. The market for such a treasure is a scene of weathered crates and coin clinks, and Saddlebag Exchange is the kind of place where it feels most at home. I watched a veteran trader whet his knife on a scrap of cloth and then, with a measured nod, name a price that fluttered between securing a future and paying a debt of memory. The Rabid Soft Wood Focus, he said, could fetch two gold at a fair table—or a little more if the seller carried a map of uncharted paths or a vial of dusk oil to sweeten the bargain. And so it passed from crate to palm, from whispered lore to practical warding, a small beacon in the caravan’s long night.