Tattered Bat Wing

The Tattered Bat Wing is a fragment of night, a barely-there map of veins across a leathery surface, its edges frayed like weathered parchment, its color a shifting duet of charcoal and midnight blue that catches lamp-light in slow, patient glints. A faint rustle flickers when the air brushes over it, as if invisible moths still dream inside the membrane. Lore suggests it was torn from the shoulder of a cave-dwelling scholar who mapped the night-blooming bats that haunt the old aqueducts, a souvenir carried by a messenger who vanished into rain. Some whisper it bore a memory, a fragment of a ward that once kept vigil over a long-lost library, while others insist it’s a trifle of bad luck—one nibble of shadow handed down through scavenger markets. In the hands of a tinker's apprentice, the wing becomes more than a relic. It is a thread in a larger story that players thread through their own adventures: a component for a late-night talisman that glows faintly when the moon is full, a texture for a decoy that echoes a distant flutter, or a sigil-cutter’s trace that lets the bearer recount a city’s rain as if it were a remembered dream. For scavengers and crafters, it lends atmosphere more than obvious power: a scene’s heartbeat, a whisper of history, the sense that every raid and ruin left behind a few scraps of memory to be repurposed. Prices drift through markets like rain through a tunnel. At Saddlebag Exchange, a weathered clerk pins a chalked note to a wooden post: Tattered Bat Wing — 17 silver, negotiable. The ledger’s margins ripple with rumors: a wing stiff with ages, a tip stained by a dash of red from a nocturnal omen, a batch with a crumpled sigil that once unlocked a private vault of story-sellers. To the collector, it’s a badge of late-night scavenging; to the crafter, a key to a lantern’s glow or a ward that shivers at every whisper of wind. Only in shaded courtyards does the wing feel fully alive—caught between the tremor of a wingbeat and the weight of a world that still believes some things can be saved by binding them to a thread of cloth, resin, and memory. When the night settles again, and the lamp oil hums, the Tattered Bat Wing remains a traveler’s note—curled, worn, and stubbornly beautiful—proof that even something so delicate can carry more weight than a full chest of gold. Some nights, a courier carries one pinned inside a map case, so that the wing’s memory keeps every route honest, every shadow honest, and every bargain tempered by the echo of a fluttering past. And in that way, the Tattered Bat Wing becomes more than a collectible; it acts as a quiet talisman for those who wander, a reminder that even fragile things can anchor a traveler through the long, rain-slick hours between dawns. Its crease holds a map of choices, and its release depends on the will to walk again tonight.