The Staff of the Lost of Severance sits on the desk like a pale, frozen wind-up of a weapon that never learned to forget. Its shaft is ash-colored, smooth where hands would grip, yet grainy as old bark where a caster’s fingers press for grip. Runes run the length in delicate, interwoven curves, threads of silver that catch candlelight and throw a dozen tiny reflections onto the wall. At the top, a cap of dark metal bears a cracked orb of smoky glass, caught in a lattice of bone-white filigree that seems to pulse with a memory it cannot quite name. The texture shifts under fingertips—from cool, almost soap-like slickness near the head to a dry, almost powdered rasp along the midsection, a sensation that makes you pause as if listening for a whispered voice buried in the grain. Lore threads cling to it as if the staff were a stitch between two separate days. They say it was forged where the living and the departed met too often, where the lost learned to bargain with the severed ties of memory. The Severance itself is spoken of with a hushed respect; not merely a weapon but a conduit that can unhook a shackle that never quite loosens, a tool that lets the bearer pry open a corner of the world where the living and the dead might still pretend to share a chair. In the right hands, the staff doesn’t simply strike or cast; it calls back echoes of those who vanished into rumor and rumor into fear, offering a chance to listen, to learn, to let go. In the thick of a rain-slick market square, its practical purpose reveals itself alongside its poetry. When dawn light breaks over a town square, the staff feels less like a tool and more like a mediator—its bursts of spectral energy weave through battle lines, creating barriers of rune-lit frost and guiding allies with a soft, guiding wisp of cold. Its powers bend light and fear in tandem, turning a hostile pressure into a moment for retreat or a moment for recollection. Players have used it to tether a rampaging foe with chains of frost, to summon a handful of translucent guardians who sweep the battlefield in quiet arcs, and to siphon a fraction of pain from wounded comrades, the pain then offered back as renewed resolve. It reads the battlefield like a chorus, choosing which note to strike to steady a wavering line. Market whispers carry the staff through towns and taverns, drifting to the Saddlebag Exchange where traders haggle over the weather of prices as if gold could weigh the weather itself. A listing there catches the eye—someone’s careful note about the Lost of Severance, a relic that promises release in exchange for patience and coin. The boards show it priced between a handful of gold and a higher summation, depending on condition and lore tint, and the crowd murmurs about whether the price matches the risk of carrying such memory in a staff’s grain. As night settles, the staff rests once more in a quiet drawer, its surface cooling with the room’s breath. It remains, for those who listen, a reminder that power and memory are not enemies but partners—each severance a doorway, each doorway a chance to choose what to carry forward.