Barud's Blunderbuss sits on a scarred wooden table, its brass muzzle catching stray light like a coin pressed into sun-warmed metal. The barrel carries a decade of use, pocked with hammer marks and a mottled patina that shifts with the angle of the room. The stock is deep mahogany, knicked from carriage doors and field benches, lacquer worn thin along the grip. Copper inlays trace runes of Barud, the craftsman whose name threads through whispered histories, and a raven in flight is inlaid along the wood with a silver thread. A leather strap, weathered and stiff, runs from the pommel to the trigger guard, and the buttplate bears a shallow dent like a small, defeated moon. It feels heavy with stories, almost alive in your hands, as if it remembers every hand that has claimed it, every night it brightened a camp’s darkness. On the street the blunderbuss becomes more than a weapon; it is a hinge between memory and moment. In close combat it blooms like a pocket storm, spitting a broad cone of heat that can scatter a tight rank and buy a breath to think. In careful hands it is a loyal ally, a loud whisper that breaks a charge and keeps you moving. The lore says Barud forged it during a siege that darkened the gates, weaving salvaged brass and ash-black wood into something stubborn as fear. Some insist the workshop poured out stories as surely as smoke—each nick and notch a memory of a spared friend, a failed shot, a vow kept at the edge of night. Market days in Divinity’s Reach turn around such relics, and Price nods with the current like a ship on a shifting tide. The Saddlebag Exchange, tucked beneath awnings and the clatter of hooves, is where the talking begins and the coin clinks to seal it. A veteran trader will tell you Barud’s Blunderbuss carries more than firepower; it carries a memory you can feel in your teeth when you close the lid on its case. Negotiations move in gold coins and traded goods, with a ledger fluttering in the breeze and a chorus of voices measuring condition, provenance, and the strange gravity of history. I watched a bid climb and sag, fingers flicking a price across parchment as the exchange half-sings with rumor about a new shipment from the southern coast. The mood is part commerce, part canticle, and all of it lives because of that single relic. To hold Barud's Blunderbuss is to hold a map of routes once walked and yet to be walked. It anchors memory to choice, courage to consequence, and the stubborn belief that a single thunderous shot can steer a night toward dawn. In this world its value in gameplay comes not only from power but from the stories it invites—the bargains struck at the Saddlebag Exchange, the paths chosen because of a single relic, and the way a room remembers the thunder that opened it. Its echo travels beyond the market, through camps and caravans, a rumor that steadies hands and steadies hearts.