Schematic: Sabotage Depot

Schematic: Sabotage Depot sits on the desk like a mislaid key, a folded sheet of pale vellum, its surface etched with inked lines that glint with oil and iron dust. The edges are knapped with copper-tinted burnishing, and a ring of iron binds the corners as if to keep the plan from escaping the page. When you tilt it to the lamp, the diagrams breathe: routes of wire, a runtime fuse sketched in red, and the silhouette of a small depot bristling with improvised explosives. It is a blueprint for quiet war, the kind you pass along in dim corners, between guarded breaths and the rustle of parchment. Lore whispers that this schematic came from a saboteur who fled a siege where the walls bled smoke and the clockwork inside the wall served as a patient, unfeeling witness. Some say the plan was drawn in a warehouse perched above a canal, where riveted drums stored gunpowder and the patience of a thief could grow into a weapon of surprise. The paper smells of resin and smoke, the ink a stubborn stain that refuses to fade, as if the plan itself has learned to survive erosion the way a field of ironweed survives a drought. In combat, the Sabotage Depot is a moment of choice. Engineers wield this schematic can assemble the device that would siphon power from a nearby siege engine or collapse the dull hum of a depot's own supply line for a few heartbeats, buying the team precious seconds to strike or retreat. It is not a weapon in the plainer sense, but a tool for shaping the battlefield's tempo: a delay to misdirect a charge, a decoy to lure archers away from a vulnerable flank, a quiet pin to the throat of a fortified objective. The device itself is intended to be placed with discretion, so that the moment of its activation comes as a sting rather than a shout. The thrill of success, for those who read the parchment rightly, is in the timing—the way a single moment can topple a plan that has taken a thousand such moments to set in motion. Prices drift like smoke in the Saddlebag Exchange, where broker’s scales tremble under talk of risk and reward. A copy of this schematic changes hands for a sum that reflects not only its utility but its lore—the temptation of secrets that might redraw a day’s map. I watched a caravan hawker push the parchment toward a collector who whispered of other schematics to tempt fate, and the exchange glowed with the quiet arithmetic of possibility. The Sabotage Depot is a relic of cunning as much as a tool of war, a reminder that knowledge, neatly bound and inked, can tilt the balance as surely as any blade. In the quiet hours after skirmishes, smiths polish its cover and mutter about the price of patience. The Depot's blueprint remains a map not only of bombs and wires, but of choices made when danger rouses.