Carrion Aetherized Longbow

The Carrion Aetherized Longbow gleams with a quiet, otherworldly sheen—a spine of ash-black wood wrapped in weathered leather, its limbs etched with quarter-moon sigils that seem to drink the light. The grip is carved with the delicate ridges of bone, polished to a velvet patina by hands that remember miles of wind and rain. Along the belly, faint runes pulse like frost-lit embers, and the string, braided from spectral fibers, hums softly when drawn. When the bow is laid on the table, a pale bloom of ash-blue motes crawls along its curve, as if the weapon exhales memories of a battle long past. It looks defeated by time only to reveal a hidden resilience—the sort that survives, and perhaps feeds, on the courage of a hunter. Lore has it that the bow was born at the edge where necromancy and celestial craft brush shoulders. It was tempered in a storm of reanimated sighs, a weapon meant for one who could see the price of a life taken and still honor the one who gave it. Some say the carrion it sprang from still circles the instrument in quiet, buzzing reverie, a chorus of spirits that lend the bow its uncanny steadiness. In the hands of a careful archer, the longbow becomes not just a tool for execution but a conduit—drawing life from the fallen toward the living, threading a narrative of sacrifice into every arrow. In practice, the Carrion Aetherized Longbow weaves into the world’s ongoing story like a thread through a seam. Its shots feel weightier, as if each arrow is loaded with a memory. Wounds inflicted by the bow seem to linger, granting the next strike a spectral fortitude—an echo of resilience that helps the user press forward in skirmishes that bottleneck into narrow corridors or cliffside ledges. For a ranger who understands the balance between patience and tempo, the weapon rewards timing: crits can harvest a pale energy from its target, stitching a temporary aura of lifesteal or self-regen into the archer’s stance. It is not merely about output; it is about keeping momentum when the world narrows and danger grows fingers-long. Markets in bustling harbors and quiet markets alike speak softly of it, threading the tale through merchant gossip and barter-charged intent. I drifted past a stall where a trader spoke in measured tones of demand and scarcity, the label on the display card catching the lamplight: Carrion Aetherized Longbow. A whisper of negotiation rose, and the vendor mentioned the Saddlebag Exchange as the place where such items change hands for a fair measure of coin and component trade. The talks drifted toward price—how rarity, condition, and the willingness of a buyer to lay down a portion of their own spirit to secure it could tilt the balance. The negotiator’s eyes gleamed with an inner calculation, and I could almost hear the exchange room sigh in agreement as the bow passed hands—priced not merely in gold, but in the trust of haggling, in the patience of a collector who knows that a weapon can outlive a life. Back out on the street, the longbow rests against a wall, and the world around it keeps its cadence—wind in the trees, footsteps on stone, the murmur of travelers who know that sometimes the best instrument is the one that remembers what it is to endure. In the end, the Carrion Aetherized Longbow is less a weapon than a memory you can draw, again and again, in service to a larger, ever-unfolding story.