Occam's Carrion Inscription

Occam's Carrion Inscription rests on a strip of bone-white parchment, its edges frayed like a moth’s last wing, the surface etched with a sigil of a carrion bird and a razor-thin line of ink that lingers with a damp, greenish glow when the light hits it just so. The parchment feels rough as old bark, yet somehow pliant, as if it could bend to the will of the bearer if coaxed with the right touch. A seal of black wax bears a tiny, patient scarab, pressed into the corner, and when you tilt the page, the glyphs shimmer as if they were breathing, slow and deliberate, a heartbeat you can almost hear if you lean in close enough. It’s the sort of thing that looks ordinary until you glimpse the quiet life in its margins—tiny runes curling along the edges like frost on a window, a rumor of rot that whispers past the edge of your perception. Locals claim it was forged in a workshop where scholars and binders traded knives for inks, a collaboration born from the old maxim that the simplest path to power is the most efficient one. The inscription’s name—Occam’s Carrion—suggests a paradox: the morbid essence of rot reduced to a single, clean pull on the thread that ties life to decay. Some say the bearer’s options narrow to a sharper, more precise flow of necromantic force; others hear the soft sigh of a field of graves, as if the ground themselves have signed their assent to a more economical scheme of life and unlife. Regardless of how you hear it, the inscription feels like a vow—quiet, inexorable, and a touch dangerous to those who blink at endings. In practice, Occam’s Carrion Inscription threads its influence through the wearer’s gear in a way that makes you feel you’re watching a small revolution unfold in the moments between a strike and a breath. Bound to a weapon or an amulet, it channels a necromancer’s intent with ruthless economy: minions respond more swiftly, carrion-based effects stay stubbornly present, and the once-fluid cost of a curse tightens into a cleaner, more efficient profile. It’s not flashy, but it changes the tempo of a fight—like a practiced recitation that exacts the same toll with far fewer words. I watched a resting necromancer in a shaded harbor apply the inscription to a bone-white staff; the glyphs brightened for an instant, and the bones orbiting his focus clicked into alignment, as though they suddenly remembered their own purpose. The haze of the battleground thickened with a sharper odor of decay and resolve, and the battlefield felt more intimate, as if every drawback was being pruned away by a careful hand. Markets carry stories as much as goods, and the Saddlebag Exchange is no exception. You’ll hear tell of seasoned traders haggling with quiet confidence as pages of runic ledgers rustle in the breeze, the price-tagging ritual turning the parchment into a map of desire. The inscription moves with a price that rises and falls with demand, and the Saddlebag crowd will tell you it’s worth it—a compact source of power that respects your time and your aim. People trade tall tales as readily as talismans, and the Inscription’s aura settles into the hands of those who understand that power, when pared down to its essence, can be more precise and more patient than brute force alone. So it passes from hand to hand, this little shard of inevitability, as if the world itself is negotiating a simpler, cleaner future with every careful purchase. Occam’s Carrion Inscription is a quiet partner in a larger story—one where every choice to bind rot into purpose is a step toward a more deliberate, unflinching kind of power.