Plaguedoctor's Exalted Coat

Plaguedoctor's Exalted Coat sits there like a relic from a fever dream: a long, sober coat of pale, ash-gray fabric that seems to swallow the light as if its threads hold a secret. The surface bears a delicate lattice of stitching—thin silver filaments that catch every glimmer and throw it back in a muted halo. The collar rises with a scholar’s precision, while the lapels curve inward, hiding a whispering seam of dark velvet that still smells faintly of tinctures and old pages. On the shoulders, pressed into the fabric, are subtle sigils—emblems of a discreet order that once walked the line between cure and contagion. The sleeves are impeccably tailored, ending in narrow cuffs that carry tiny brass buckles, half ceremonial, half pragmatic, as if the coat were designed for both sermon and skirmish. When you run a finger along the exterior, you feel a careful stiffness beneath the softness, as if the garment holds its breath until it’s needed to shield something fragile: a healer’s calm, a survivor’s resolve, or a heart racing under a plague-wrought sky. Lore ties the coat to a forgotten chapter of the city’s healers—those plague doctors who wore masks of rumor and medicine, who walked the liminal space between pestilence and protection. It is said to have been woven not only with wool and sinew but with vows: to guard the living from the contagion of fear as much as from the contagion of disease. To hear a veteran recount it is to feel the air grow dense with memory, as if the coat itself were listening, waiting to be asked to stand between a patient and a crowd, to cool a fevered brow with a whisper of cloth and a patient’s breath. In practice, the Exalted Coat is a badge of endurance as much as it is a shield. Wielded by healers and frontline providers alike, it anchors builds that rely on steadfast presence and the ability to weather multiple threats at once. Its weave is described in trade as being particularly resilient—capable of withstanding abrupt shifts in tempo, whether a sudden panic in a besieged fort or a long, methodical slog through a corrupted landscape. Wearers often find themselves positioning the coat as both armor and invitation: it signals that care is not passivity but a deliberate act of resistance, a choice to stay in the fray long enough to push back the tide. The coat’s role in the world hums with a quiet, larger story. It has become a talisman for communities that stitch themselves back together after crisis—the guild halls and wandering caravans whose members trade tales as readily as they trade wares. Merchants speak of it with a wary respect, knowing its value is as much about its aura as its actual protection. And in the busy, sun-bleached stalls of the Saddlebag Exchange, where bright prices and brighter promises mingle, the Exalted Coat moves through conversations the way a patient moves through a corridor: slowly, carefully, with the knowledge that a single decision can tip the balance between despair and endurance. So a buyer will pause, appraisal in hand, listening to the coat’s quiet story as it passes from one hand to another. The price, like the plague the coat once faced, remains a living thing—rising with scarcity, softening with shared knowledge, and always, somehow, tethered to the trust that those who wear it will choose protection as a form of hope.