Brittle Cape

Brittle Cape hangs in the dim lantern light, a shivering whisper of fabric that looks spun from frost. The surface glints with a pale, opalescent sheen, and every thread seems anchored to a story: threads of pale blue, threads of ash-gray, all fraying at the edges like old parchment torn by wind. When you cradle it, it feels lighter than it should, as though the weight of a thousand winters has been siphoned into its weave. The texture crackles softly under your fingers, not unlike dried leaves pressed between a book's cover, and if you press your palm along the inner seam you can feel the faint tremor of a spell that might shatter the cape with a single breath. Lore ties it to the old courier routes, to a storm-swept sailor who wove it from the wind itself, and to a legend of a caravan that vanished in a blizzard while its bearer clutched a cape that refused to be trusted. In the daylight of the road, the cape performs in the world as more than ornament. It is said to be feather-light, granting near-silent steps to those who know how to move with seam and breath. It shifts with the wearer’s motions, the brittle threads creaking with a careful promise: tread softly, or watch the weave crack and reveal a hidden seam. In the right quest, the cape becomes a partner in disguise. When kept intact, it dampens the chill that steals a rider’s courage; when the moment demands it, the warp is tempted to fracture, revealing a pocket where a map or a scrap of a forgotten contract is tucked away. Those who have worn it measure its value not by how well it protects the body, but by how it changes the story around them: a cape that makes the world lean closer, listening for the whisper of a secret path. Prices are seldom settled with numbers alone. Traders speak of a range—clean, unblemished specimens fetch a premium, while those with more character, the ones whose edges curl and threaten to snap at the slightest misstep, earn a different kind of interest. In the bustling Saddlebag Exchange, where merchants bend and barter beneath canvased awnings and the clink of coin is constant, the cape’s price becomes a spell of its own: a silver or two for a worn thread, a handful of coins and a rumor for something sturdier, more certain. It is a market that loves stories, and the Brittle Cape tells one with every shuttle of light it catches, a fragment of memory that keeps weaving itself back into the world, thread by delicate thread. It remains a strange relic—fragile, beautiful, and dangerously inviting—reminding anyone who holds it that some legends are not meant to be worn until the moment they are earned, and that sometimes the most fragile things carry the strongest voices in the world. Some nights I still hear the soft creak as the cape remembers every hand that wore it.