Rabid Verdant Short Bow

The Rabid Verdant Short Bow rests in a trader’s calloused palm like a leaf-woven relic, its limbs of ash-green wood catching light with a whisper-thin gleam. The grip is wrapped in snake-skin leather dyed the color of new shoots; the bowstring hums softly when drawn, a hungry note promising speed more than brute power. Riser runes—snarling teeth and curling vines—etch the wood, catching the eye and vanishing again as if the forest itself is rubbing against your hands. The bow’s tips taper to fine points, with jade inlays that pulse faintly whenever you lean into the shot. The Verdant name isn’t merely color here, but a forest’s whisper, a covenant with the land that grows back what you take if you shoot with restraint. Legend ties the weapon to the Verdant Fens, where a hunter-scout bound a restless green spirit into a blade that threads through brush without snapping a leaf. When you string it, you feel a pulse, a heartbeat skipping in the trees, and its short reach makes it deadly in tight spaces where patience outruns raw power. In practice, its strength lies in tempo: a rapid sequence of precise shots that pepper a target’s guard, punctured with a hint of poison or bleed if the moon is right. Those who favor condition builds—poison, bleed, or burning—find the Rabid Verdant Short Bow to be a tireless companion, delivering status while you weave through shadows. It’s the tool of a scout who trusts the brush more than open ground, or a renegade ranger who prefers movement to standstill fire, slipping between trunks as if the forest itself lent you its own breath. Market voices thread through the square as dusk folds over copper roofs. A weathered trader will tell you the bow’s value shifts with affixes, and a well-placed rune can tilt a bid one way or another. The Saddlebag Exchange, a bustling corner where caravans pin wares on parchment and coin, lists Rabid Verdant Short Bows with varying traits, prices swinging with supply and demand. In quiet moments you’ll hear it priced at a handful of silver; in the right season it climbs, becoming a legend in someone’s hands who earns each shot with care. A buyer studies the jade glow in the inlays, another weighs the extra condition synergy, and a young hunter smiles at the thought of what this compact weapon could become in the wider story of their journeys. The seller leans back, tracing the bow’s silhouette against the fading light, imagining the tales that will unfold when it finally leaves the stall. Through all the chatter, the bow remains more than wood and leather; it’s a thread between hunter and hunted, a small story that keeps repeating as long as someone draws the string at dawn’s green edge and steps back into the brush with quiet purpose, letting the forest answer with a scent of resin, a whisper of leaves, and a shot that lands true.