Dire Orrian Warhorn of the Geomancer

Dire Orrian Warhorn of the Geomancer lay on the desk, its surface a midnight gloss of obsidian-hued horn, carved runes curling along its length like springing vines. The lip is wrapped in a bronze collar, pitted with time, and a weathered leather thong threads through a notch to keep it steady when it’s lifted to the breath. The texture is cool and grainy, the edges sharp with age, and a thin film of dust clings to the carved sigils, catching candlelight in a slow, patient gleam. The horn's presence carries a whisper of the quarries where Orrian miners once coaxed ore from stubborn rock; a scent of rain on stone lingers in the air, as if the weapon itself remembers storms that fell on a ruined coast. Lore keeps to its grooves: this is the instrument a geomancer would blow to wake the earth, to call a tremor, to awaken a stone guardian, to seal a fissure with living stone. Along its underside, a time-worn sigil glints, a smith’s vow to bend earth at will. When the horn erupts with sound, the room tilts toward the speaker. The note is not merely loud but reverberant. In battle it becomes a tool as intimate as a shield and as surprising as a quake: the user channels mineral marrow to harden armor’s outer ring, spawn an earthen barrier that shrugs off arrows, and briefly loosen soil beneath feet to slow foes. In quieter moments, a geomancer can coax ore-rich veins to glow beneath the party's feet, revealing hidden crates. It is not a relic that burns bright; it hums with patient power, asking to be used with care, lest the earth lash back. The item’s true weight, though, lies in its story. Chiefs of the old Orrian houses spoke of a ritual that bound a horn’s voice to the land itself, a pact that made the helm of a fortress tremor when enemies sought to force a breach. To carry it is to pay a quiet debt to the earth: every crack in the horn’s surface is a reminder of a canyon’s collapse and of a life saved by a well-timed shout that turned a siege into a retreat. Market chatter makes the horn a conversation piece as much as a tool. In the lanes near the Saddlebag Exchange, buyers and traders discuss its price as if reciting a verse from a grimoire: a sum that shifts with the wind, hovering in the upper range of exotics, reachable to a patient buyer and a sharp seller. A clerk there will tell you the demand is steady, and that, if you’re willing to part with a handful of gold, you’ll walk away with more than a bargain—perhaps a horn that changes the tempo of a fight as deftly as the earth itself. I watched a pair haggle over it, the buyer pressing for a quick sale while the seller counted the echoes of distant quarries, until they settled on a fair, earned price.