Rabid Verdant Focus

Rabid Verdant Focus sits like a captured breath, a palm-sized shard of living emerald whose surface thrums with leaf-green glow. The shell is a lacquered horn etched with sinewy vines that twist from tip to base. A thin film of sap beads along the rim, and within the glass lens at its core a tiny, restless thing darts—a speck of green light that inhales and exhale with the wearer’s rhythm. The feel is cool and soft, as if the object remembers being pressed to a tree’s heart during a storm, and the texture hints at bark and sap clinging to skin after contact. Lore connections say it was hammered into service by a renegade gardener among the Verdant Kin, a druidic sect that bound a grove to the city’s spirit. They say the focus was grown, not forged, a seed of power grafted into a tool, then rabid with hunger—for growth and defense. When attuned, vines answer your will, and a shield of living green blooms around you, leaf and resin weaving with your motion. In the right hands it becomes a guide and a weapon: a beacon that pushes back night and a conduit through which allies drink vitality. On the road between markets and ruined watchtowers, I learned to listen for the chatter of the item in battle. Elementalists and necromancers alike trade looks for its power to channel energy, an emerald burn that heals as it harms. It sharpens focus, steadies the breath, and when the moment isn’t right it folds itself back into quiet growth, waiting for the next gust of wind to hurry its leaves toward bloom. Its uses are many: severing a storm of conditions, projecting a tiny living barrier, drawing life from the earth to sustain an ally’s stride, twisting a momentary surge of power into a burst of defensive terrain. At the Saddlebag Exchange, a caravan spreads rumors of what any one piece can command. A trader with sun-creased skin and a nose for rare things held the Rabid Verdant Focus in both hands, turning it over so the light could kiss the sap and show its pale green glow. The price, dictated by the stall ledger, landed in the three-gold range, depending on mood, bargaining, and whether the buyer spoke softly enough to coax a memory from the wood. We spoke of forests, the old city’s heart, and fevered growth that would not be satisfied until every ruin sprouted again. That is the truth of it: a thing that is old and hungry, a relic that demands companionship as it gives life in return. The Rabid Verdant Focus is more than metal and moss; it is a map of the world’s stubbornness, a reason to walk a road crowded with traders and legends, a prompt to help a fellow traveler stay upright when the path grows thorny. In the end, it does what living artifacts do: it changes the story just by being carried, one breath, one step, one leaf at a time.