Glowing Gland

Glowing Gland rests in my gloved palm, a teardrop of glassy shell that seems to pulse with private weather. The surface is impossibly smooth, like cooled honey, yet it carries a lattice of faint veinwork that glimmers when you tilt it to the light. Its core is a living jewel, a green-gold heartbeat that never settles, brightening and dimming as if it were listening to the course of footsteps around it. The texture is cool to the touch, with a subtle, elastic give that hints at some hidden pressure inside rather than a stubborn fragility. Lore whispers that this is no mere ornament but a vessel: a fragment torn from a creature or plant that learned to harvest moonlight, trained by old lantern-keepers to store a spark of life for a season of travel or danger. When I pressed it to a candle’s edge and watched the glow widen, I recalled the first tales I heard of its kin—the way hunters once used a single gland as a beacon through the Glasswood, drawing the wary and the hungry alike toward a clear path or a cruel trap. In those stories, the gland’s light didn’t merely illuminate the way; it spoke to the world in a language of shadow and flame, revealing the true shape of danger and opportunity in equal measure. It’s easy to tease apart the romance with a healer’s bill—the jade core multiplying the potency of tinctures that brighten a night march, the band of runes etched along its outer shell that flare when activating a ward against frost or fear. Yet the reality in the field is muddier and more intimate: a trader’s pocket, a campfire glow, a whispered bargain that could decide whether a caravan reaches dawn with both goods and bones intact. In practice, the Glowing Gland is a catalyst as much as a courage-booster. In alchemical work, its energy doubles the effectiveness of luminescent oils, turning a simple lamp into a shield against the encroaching dark. For those who seek to enchant blades or armour, it can be coaxed into imbuing a faint protective sheen, a filter that deflects cold steel and cold moods alike. And for travelers who live by the moon, it becomes a portable star, a compact beacon that makes safe routes feel possible when the night itself seems to refuse your footsteps. The world’s take on it grows from the same roots as the glade it hails from: a reminder that light travels with intention, not merely as a spectacle. Market stories add color to the glow. I’ve watched a quiet, patient exchange at Saddlebag Exchange, where hands hover over the gland like a bird over a nest and the air smells faintly of resin and rain. The price shifts with the season, with supply and rumor alike, and a seasoned buyer will weigh color shift and pulse rate as carefully as coin. A single gland can fetch a respectable purse when the moon is generous, or it can languish, a bright thing passing through quiet hands for a pittance when trade winds fall silent. It’s a living artifact, after all, and the price is a narrative in itself. I pocket the gland with a soft, reverent breath, knowing that tonight its glow will guide more than one path through the dark. The world keeps turning, and the Glowing Gland keeps telling its small, stubborn truth: light is a choice, and choices endure.