Minor Potion of Undead Slaying

The Minor Potion of Undead Slaying sits in a small hand-blown bottle of pale amber glass, the curved shape catching the light like a nervous moth. The liquid inside shimmers with a faint emerald glimmer, as if a tiny furnace burns just beneath the surface. A cork stopper is sealed with wax bearing a sigil—a skull over crossed blades—meant to endure damp market air. A parchment label, browned by time, inked with runes that promise protection against what crawls in the dark. When you tilt it, the potion’s surface gleams and the scent of rosemary, iron, and rain-silver wafts up, a reminder that this is not a mere tincture but a ward in a bottle. Those who have faced graveyards and necromancers in cramped corridors know its grip: a single prickle of green light that blooms along steel, turning ordinary blows into consecrated wards against the dead. In a skirmish against revenants and bone-dark wighths, it makes the air feel thicker with reverence, as if the very light within cleanses the atmosphere of wrongness. The potion is a one-use beacon, a momentary shield and amplifier rolled into one; it does not banish the dead, but it tilts the odds, sharpening a hunter’s strike and quieting the whisper of the grave beneath each step. Adventurers carry it tucked in a belt pouch or the inner pocket of a satchel, ready to crack it open when the first pale knee of a ghast appears around a ruined corner. On a ramshackle street, beneath awnings stitched with stories, I found Saddlebag Exchange selling a cache of such vials. The stall’s leather curtains hissed as customers pressed forward, trading stories and coin. The vendor, an older traveler with weathered hands, priced the vial at three silver coins—a fair sum for a bargain-worn caravan. We bartered as if the vial were a word in a long poem: a sentence of risk, a clause of hope. I left with one vial in a flannel-lined tin, the wax seal still unbroken. Locals say the recipe hails from a temple half-swallowed by the shadows, where bone and light were learned as one. Some whisper that the potion carries a fragment of a ward laid to rest a century ago, a memory imprinted into the glass. Regardless, every time its cork pops and the green glow spills into a camp fire, it ties the present to whispered legends, reminding the world that even in the hum of ordinary days, there are guardians and bargains waiting behind every doorway. Some say the recipe came from a temple half-swallowed by shadows; others swear it was brewed in a salt-washed harbor. Thus the vial becomes more than a practical tool; it is a thread in the larger tapestry—the sort of object that starts a story, not just ends a skirmish. In a world where the dead linger in the margins, a small bottle of slaying is enough to turn fear into forward motion, to let a party press on toward whatever dawn might come after night.