Seven of Hunt

Seven of Hunt is a talisman carved from dusk-black bone, its surface slick with a whisper of oil and years. Seven arrowhead sigils coil in a seamless circle, their tips brushing the edge of a central bead of amber that glows faintly when the night grows thick. The patina is cool to the touch, a smoothness broken only by the faint grain of the bone, like weathered wood aged by wind and decision. In the faint lamplight the sigils seem to move, a silent chorus etched into the dark, as if the object keeps count of what the eye cannot. Legends say it was wrought by the Huntwrights, a circle of trackers who traded stories with wolves and birds, binding luck to fear and courage to patience. They laid seven promises upon the bone—seven hunts, seven chances to learn the shadow’s path. The bead at the center is more legend than metal: some say it once held a drop of dawn, others insist it keeps a tiny compass of the wild, pointing toward the nearest sign of life. Whatever its origin, the seven sigils are a ledger of moments—each a choice, a risk, a turning point—frozen into a keepsake that rewards the wearer with a quiet, almost sentient, sense of direction when the chase matters most. In the world I walked through, the Seven of Hunt woke with the wind. When shoulder-to-shoulder with your quarry, the talisman softens the edge of fear and sharpens the eye for faint tracks—tiniest root scrapes, a broken feather, a smear of earth where a creature pressed its weight into the hillside. It isn’t a weapon, not in the clamor of steel, but a companion that folds the hunter tighter to the earth. Those who have worn it speak of a moment when a scent becomes a thread and a shadow becomes a doorway. Put rightly, it makes the hunt a dialogue with the land itself: a prompt to read moss on a rock as a map, a voice in the brush as a signpost. And when the seventh hunt approaches, the sigils flare in the amber center, and the wearer gains a breath of speed, a tunnel of calm through panic, and a keener sense of when to press and when to pause. It is said that the seventh tally completes not a kill, but a story—the hunter learns to listen to the world’s unspoken terms. Markets across the caravan routes whisper of Seven of Hunt as much as the stories of the prey it chases. In the hum of the Saddlebag Exchange, merchants trade legends for coin, and coin for legends, their voices stacked with caution and awe. Last night, a leather-sheathed dealer offered a price that hovered between gratitude and greed, noting the season’s pull and the rarity of a calm mind in a wild chase. He weighed the bone against a pouch of dried berries and a map stained by rain, letting the numbers drift until the amber glow answered him with a shy pulse. The deal, like many, was a negotiation between fate and fortune, a reminder that some things—like the seven promises baked into this talisman—are worth more alive in the world than locked away in a drawer. Seven of Hunt remains here not just as a prize, but as a companion in a larger story—one that follows the wind, the tracks, and the sound of distant hounds across a land where every chase writes the next chapter.