Recipe: Laranthir's Shoulderguard

The Recipe: Laranthir's Shoulderguard lies on the desk like a weathered map, its parchment thin as a dried leaf and the ink faded to a dusky blue that only catches the light when you tilt it just so. A seal of iron, stamped with a crescent and a crest that promises old orders and older promises, sits in the corner, its wax cracked but unmoved. The diagrams are a tangle of lines—curved sigils, a whisper-thin thread of runes looping around the border, a little sketch of a shoulderpiece bearing a proud, if restrained, emblem. The parchment’s texture betrays a life of handling: chalky with age in some places, slick with oil in others, as if countless hands have traced the steps of its craft. That is how lore enters the room, through touch: the recipe is not merely instruction but memory pressed between two sheets of humble vellum. What draws a reader to the page is not only the beauty of its calligraphy but the sense that the blueprint is a hinge between past and present. The insignia—two leaf-like flourishes intersecting a stylized shield—speaks of a hero who stood at the edge of a city’s dawn and whispered that protection should be worn, not merely claimed. When you study the recipe, you can almost hear the clink of metal against leather and the soft creak of a workshop door opening to a crowd that has come to believe in a single, shared defense. The Shoulderguard itself would carry its own stories: the line of stitching that recalls the careful craftsmanship of old masters, the way the sigil threads weave through the leather to catch the light when a campaign shifts from gathering to skirmish. It feels less like equipment and more like a page torn from a chronicle—one you could wear, if you were willing to take on the burden of its history. In practice, the recipe is a doorway. Once learned, it animates a set of crafts—tannery and metalwork, inks and dyes, the subtle art of combining materials that bend to a wearer’s purpose. The shoulders that result are more than protection; they are a statement about stance and survivability. A wearer gains not only resilience but a frame for their build to breathe around: the shoulders kiss the arc of a shield, mirror the dancer’s upper lines, and give a silhouette that says, “I stood in the line and did not falter.” It is the kind of piece that threads into a party’s narrative as well as a character’s. Market days lend the most visible shimmer to its tale. I watched a caravan stop at the hub by the river, a clerk unrolling the blueprint with reverence, and the crowd murmuring about rarity and demand. The going rate moved with the day’s mood and the crowd’s appetite, finding footing in the Saddlebag Exchange where traders swap not just goods but stories. A seasoned merchant mentioned a price that could fetch a small fortune on festival days, then tempered it with practical love for a sturdy build—because the reality of trading isn’t merely coins; it’s trust in the workmanship and in the heart of a lineage that still teaches craftsmen to listen to metal and parchment alike. And so the Recipe: Laranthir’s Shoulderguard continues to travel—between hands, between cities, between the memory of a hero and the shoulder of the next wearer who chooses to carry that memory forward.