Draconis Mons Empowerment

The Draconis Mons Empowerment gleams like a shard of molten obsidian, a small oval of black glass set in a frame of dragon-bone ivory. Its surface bears fine scales etched in coppery relief, and when you tilt it to the light, tiny runes pulse with amber heat, as if a tiny coal train runs beneath the skin of the stone. The texture is cool to the touch, smooth at first, then grainy as if a dragon’s skin had been polished with night wind. In certain lights, a red vein runs through the center, a living seam of magma that seems to breathe with your own heartbeat. Lore says this piece was created at the mouth of Draconis Mons, where storms braid with basalt and old pacts were hammered into objects that could carry a dragon’s intent. It is not a mere trinket, but a vessel—an offering to bound power, a ritual seal pressed into the palm of a hunter, a guardian, or a merchant. Bind it to a weapon or piece of armor, and the Empowerment awakens. It does not merely sit there as ornament; it threads itself into your gear and stirs the air around you with a faint scent of brimstone and old pine. On the weapon, it sharpens the cut, lending a dragon’s precision in the swing; on armor, it wraps the wearer in a faint, protective aura that glows like embers beneath a charcoal sky. Some builds gain a surge of vitality, others a sharper edge against the conditions that plague the battlefield. The empowerment is strongest when the world itself seems to burn: when you fight in the ash-sand of a volcanic plateau, or when a storm crackles over a ruined fortification. In those moments, the rune-laden stone seems to hum, a signal that you carry not just steel, but a fragment of a dragon’s memory. Within the wider world, the item is as much a story as a stat. It ties the expeditions to Mons to the travelers who chart the sea-roads back to human markets, where caravans carry both rumor and rare wares. The Saddlebag Exchange—the network of traders, scribes, and coin-touchers who trade by foot and feather—receives whispers of new empowers with the same patience they reserve for mythical maps. The price fluctuates with demand: some weeks a few gold, other weeks a dozen, depending on the scarcity of dragon-blood contracts and the luck of smiths who still remember the old rites. A careful buyer learns the rhythm, watching the boards while a kettle hisses in the night and the moon leans close to the harbor. So the Draconis Mons Empowerment remains a paradox: both a practical upgrade for a brave kit and a relic that makes you walk with a dragon’s shadow. It invites you to decide which story you want to tell at the forge, under the smoke of a distant volcano, with the world listening for the next spark that could ignite a legend. Its glow lingers long after.