Aurene's Voice

Aurene's Voice sits in the palm like a cooled teardrop of jade, its surface a living map of wind-sculpted rivers and faint constellations that shift with the light. The shard is small enough to cradle, yet heavy with a gravity that feels genetic, as if it carries a memory of a dragon’s breath in its core. Its edges are polished to a glass-slick finish, but if you tilt it just so you can catch a shimmer of inner fire—as if the crystal itself recalls what it has heard. A thin seam runs along the rim, where the jade seems to have been kissed by something more metallic, a trace of craft and care from hands that understood the dragon’s voice better than most. The texture is cool and almost velvety to the touch, a paradox that makes you slow your pace and listen. When the light slides across its facets, you see the glow pulse in time with your own heartbeat, a reminder that you hold not merely an artifact but a conduit to something larger. Legends say Aurene herself shared a fragment of her voice with the crystal before the world learned to call her by name, and that the shard remembers the cadence of her first roars, the way she learned to bend the air around her as if it were a ribbon. Some travelers claim the voice awakens in silence first, a whisper that grows stronger as you earn trust with dragonkind, and only then does the shard begin to hum with a chorus you can almost hear if you lean close enough. In practical terms, Aurene's Voice is a rare key and a tempered gift. Those who carry it report a subtle channeling of ancestral resonance: a boon that surfaces during moments of dragon-sprung peril or when you stand at the edge of a puzzle tied to Aurene’s lineage. It can nudge your skills toward harmony with the dragon’s power, turning dissonance into a moment of clarity for a group’s strategy or allowing a healer to balance an ally’s burden with a breath of synchronized vitality. It is not a weapon, exactly, but a harmonizer—an artifact that makes dragon-tinged magic more accessible in a world that often asks you to listen rather than shout. The shard doesn’t just sit on a shelf; it asks you to move, to seek resonance in the world’s longer story, and to weave your fate with the dragon who learned to speak in echoes. Market talk is a language of its own, of course, and the road from discovery to use bends through trade. On a sunlit corner where caravans pause, I watched a stall tucked beneath a faded banner—the Saddlebag Exchange, as it’s known in these lanes—unfurl its wares like a quiet tide. The shopkeeper spoke in measured breaths, pricing Aurene's Voice with a fairness earned from years of listening to buyers and sellers who understand the weight of a legend. We traded notes, then coins; a few minted gold coins and a delicate piece of cloth, nothing flashy, yet enough to carve a path into the dragon’s next conversation. It wasn’t merely a purchase; it felt like stepping into a broader chapter, where the road ahead would answer the shard’s whisper if you were brave enough to listen.