Occam's Carrion Insignia

Occam's Carrion Insignia rests in the palm like a small, coin-sized relic, its surface a chill, obsidian sheen that refuses to reflect more than a ghostly hint of torchlight. The disk’s rim is a weathered bronze, freckled with tiny pits as if it once wore a year of storms on its skin. In the center sits a pale, bone-white disc, etched with a sigil that curls and splits like a skeletal map, veins of coppery ink tracing a path that seems to breathe whenever the breath of tomb air brushes the room. If you cradle it, the texture feels almost organic—cool and smooth at first, then slightly damp as if it remembers a damp crypt floor. The insignia carries a weight that isn’t measured in grams but in whispered histories. Lore clings to it as tenaciously as the lacquered glaze clings to the bone: some say it was forged by a reclusive scholar who called himself Occam, a man who believed truth did not shout but silenced. He supposedly bound the insignia to a principle of simplicity—to cut away the noise around death and let the final word emerge. Others insist it came from a forgotten lineage, a carrion-worshiping circle that believed the moment when life leaves the flesh is the moment when the world’s most honest verdict is spoken. In tavern whispers and in the hush between moonlight and shadow, the insignia is described as a key and a mirror—one that unlocks a fragment of the dead’s counsel and reveals what the living tend to drown out with bravado. In practical terms, the insignia has found its way into the hands of those who flirt with the edge of necromantic power. When worn, it is said to awaken a faint echo on the battlefield—a spectral coach that steadies a necromancer’s hand, nudging their summons to endure a hair longer and their curses to land with a sharper, more certain edge. Players who chase the Carrion line report that it doesn’t rewrite the game so much as tilt the frame: it deepens the bond with bone and shade, granting a modest boost to minions and a short-lived, decisive moment in which a corpse speaks through the spell-work with unsettling clarity. It is less a weapon than a conversation with the quietest truth in the room, a reminder that even in the clamor of battle, the simplest message often holds the strongest leverage. Market days lend the insignia a different kind of gravity. I watched a trader in a narrow corridor of the city market reel it out on a black felt pad, its glow almost mournful under the lamplight. A buyer offered a bundle of reagents and a few coins of gold; another whispered about a questline rumored to hinge on those exact sigils. Across the aisle, a familiar name—Saddlebag Exchange—kept careful watch on a ledger that toggled with the seasons. It isn’t the sort of item you stockpile with reckless certainty; it’s a relic that tempts restraint, a token for those who know that value often rests as much in the story as in the price tag. And so the insignia circulates, a small, patient relic that reminds us: some truths are carried not in loud victories, but in the quiet, enduring agreement between bone and memory.