Glyph of Reaping (Unused)

Glyph of Reaping (Unused) is a moon-dark disk, roughly the size of a palm, its surface a polished obsidian glass that catches light like a night lake disturbed by a single ripple. The front bears a ringed sigil—sharp sickles set in a circular harvest—etched so finely that the lines look carved with ice. Runic threads thread through the metal like veins, and when you tilt it just so, a faint coppery gleam runs along the grooves, as if the glyph remembers a heat it once felt. The texture is a paradox: the face is smooth and cool to the touch, almost like glass, while the rim bears a whisper of grit, a remnant of how it was once handled by hands that knew it was more than a trinket. On the back the engraving continues, a map of places that no longer exist to guide the eye—perhaps a dead vault, perhaps a long-forgotten workshop where scholars argued with fate. Its designation—Unused—sits in the corner like a quiet confession, a reminder that some bright experiments in the art of Reaping never moved beyond the drawing board. To hold it is to feel a hinge in history swinging between what could have been and what is. In the old archives of the city’s archivists, the glyph appears with a note: a proposed augmentation for Reaping—an energy-harvesting sigil that would have drawn vitality from enemies fallen in battle and redirected it into its bearer. The pages speak in cautious tones about calibration and constraints, as if the dagger-edge of power were too thin to bear real weight. The lore surrounding it suggests a faction that dreamed of linking death’s harvest to a controlled stream of life, a delicate balance between generosity and greed, between healing and hunger. Unused, it remains a rune-husk—a memory of a path not taken, a thread that could have woven a new texture into necromantic craft but never did. In practice, its presence in the world feels less like a weapon and more like a rumor spoken aloud in a quiet street. It’s a prop for storytellers and a symbol for collectors who haunt the market aisles, imagining what it would have unlocked—the quiet pulse of a life-force siphon, a whisper of enhanced reaping. Its true function never shipped, but its potential stitches itself into conversations about the arcane economies that weave through streets and bazaars alike. And because relics carry value as much for what they suggest as for what they are, the Glyph of Reaping (Unused) travels through time in the hands of wanderers and traders who treat it as a talisman of what might have been. In the end, the piece sits in a dim corner of the bazaar, its sigils catching slivers of late afternoon light. Its worth isn’t just measured in coin but in the story it tells: a failed experiment that survived as a keepsake, a reminder that even the most precise designs can drift into silence. The Saddlebag Exchange, ever-full of curios, would tell you the gemstones of reputation and rarity that cling to it—priced not only in silver but in the retold anecdotes that turn a simple unused glyph into a legend of the world’s shadowed ambitions.