Plaguedoctor's Pearl Needler

Plaguedoctor's Pearl Needler sits on a narrow market stall, its body a swirl of milky nacre that catches lamplight and spills color across the dust. The barrel is slender and cool to the touch, like ivory carved from winter tide; a glass vial sits behind the muzzle, sealed with brass and a faint glow of venom. The grip is grave-black leather, worn smooth by hands that have counted more breaths than they should. The needle gleams, a patient line of steel, curved as if listening for a whisper of disease to ride its tip. Lore says it was forged by plague doctors who traded masks for sharper tools, to thread death through a crowded street without showing their hand. To hold it is to feel a quiet threat and a promise. In battle it threads toxins into the air with methodical precision, delivering slender needles that prick foes and leave a sheen of Poison that stacks with each hit. Its real art emerges when used with care—a patient hunter weaving a web: a puncture, a follow‑up to coax Bleeding, then a widening arc of disease that drifts toward nearby targets, painting the plaza with creeping corruption. Players speak of its synergy with condition-heavy builds, how it condenses multiple procs into decisive moments, turning a crowded square into a corridor of doom. It is not raw power, but tempo, timing, and the sense that each strike is a careful truth in a world that moves too fast. Prices drift like tides. The finest specimens come from old camps or sealed chests in sunken ships, and the asking price reflects that history—a handful of gold, a trinket, a promise. I found mine through Saddlebag Exchange, the busy dockside tent where buyers haggle with a wink and a curse. The clerk laid out a ledger, numbers glinting in candlelight as if the ink itself whispered; this wasn’t charity, it was a reckoning between people who understand the weight of a weapon that cures in one breath and kills in the next. I traded a weathered map of forgotten routes plus a pocket watch that still ticked against the rain, and a handful of silver coins. When I walked away, the pearl hummed softly against my palm, listening for the world to sneeze. Back at the camp, the Pearl Needler rests near my lamp, its glow a pale warning. The item carries a memory of those who stood between plague and people, a relic that binds a hunter to a larger web of stories: a city under siege, rumors at the river, a world where every needle can mend or ruin. To own it is to bear a small part of the plague doctor's vow: strike with care, heal when possible, and remember that beauty can carry a sting. In that tension—the cure and the curse—the Pearl Needler keeps its edge, not just as weaponry, but as a sign that history still threads its way through every hand that grips it and every street it lights with pale, patient light.