Catapult Blueprint

Catapult Blueprint rests on a table, parchment thick as hide, its edges singed and curling where the lamp flame has wavered. The surface bears a honey-dark patina, creases running like map contours across a field of diagrammatic arcs. Inked lines thread together in a precise dance: a catapult drawn in profile, with wheels splayed wide for balance, chalk-white pegs marking pivot points, and faint sigils along the margins that look almost like a whisper of an old oath. The texture gives under a fingertip, slightly waxy where a resin was brushed on to keep the ink from feathering, and the corners carry a stubborn stiffness that hints at months spent quivering in a chest of trade leads and seasonable rain. It smells of pine resin, lamp oil, and the faint kiss of burnt parchment—things that tell a story of careful hands and long nights. The diagram isn’t merely a blueprint; it’s a thread that ties a moment in siege history to a plan still very much alive. Along the bottom margin, a dozen tiny runes—perhaps a craftsman’s signature, perhaps a date—surface like a stubborn memory. Some say the blueprint was sketched by a journeyman who rode with engineers into a forested pass and learned to coax balance from timber and tension. Others swear it was inspired by a long-forgotten siege where a quiet courtyard was saved by the precise rhythm of wheels and whetstones. Either way, the Catapult Blueprint carries a lore that feels almost tactile, as if the parchment itself remembers the thundering click of a winch and the moment a wall begins to give. In gameplay terms, the blueprint becomes a doorway to a different tempo of battle. It’s not merely a tool but a narrative lever—the moment a commander positions a line of siege engines and calls the air to weight. Once crafted, the Catapult speaks through its stones: launched to breach walls, to topple shielded windows, to send a rain of heavy projectiles over a parapet and tilt a skirmish toward the attacker’s favor. It requires timing, crew, and a plan that respects supply chains—timber, rope, and iron—so that the engine doesn’t merely exist, but performs. The rhythm it introduces can turn a stalemate into a turning point, a single launch becoming the hinge on which a campaign swings. Pricing and exchange happen in the same breath as strategy. On a sun-drenched morning or in the shadowed backroom of a trade post, the blueprint finds its way to Saddlebag Exchange, where baskets, crates, and ledger pages mingle. The chatter there is not a shout of coin alone but a chorus of value—stories of scarcity, needs of engineers, rumors of new stock. The price tag slips from hand to hand, a quiet negotiation that reflects more than gold: a barter of risk, trust, and the hope that a well-placed shot will alter tomorrow’s map. It’s in these exchanges that the Catapult Blueprint stops being a page and becomes a shared future, a fragment of history under new tension, ready to be drawn into the next siege, the next chapter, the next line that binds one era to the next.