Track 17: Veins of the Dragon

Track 17: Veins of the Dragon is a disk the color of moonlit obsidian, a palm-sized circle whose surface seems to drink the light and throw it back in ribbons of coppery glow. Fine veins wind across its face like an anatomy map drawn in living fire, each line catching and releasing a whisper of warmth as your fingers trace the creases. The texture feels almost wet, though it’s cool to the touch, a glassy glaze over a core that hums faintly when the room grows quiet. On the rim, runes coil in a spiral that resembles a dragon’s heartbeat, and at the center a tiny glyph, a stylized maw, seems to hold its breath until you press your palm flat against it. I’ve watched the track claim a room’s attention the way a rare storm can pull a village into a single story. The copper veins don’t merely decorate the surface; they pulse with a soft, living rhythm, as if the dragon whose memories it carries still stirs beneath the glaze. Lore whispers that this is more than a relic of craft—that it is a fragment torn from a dragon’s song, captured when the world was young and the trails of magic ran hotter. To those who listen, the impressions on the disk feel like a map of lifelines, a current that threads through rock and memory alike. Some say the Veins of the Dragon was pressed from scales borrowed in a moment of fragile peace, a talisman used by storytellers and scholars to keep a memory from slipping away. In practice, Track 17 has become something of a hinge in small, stubborn stories—a collectible that doubles as a key to understanding who we are in the places where ancient tensions still murmur under the ground. When a bard or a curious tinkerer unfurls the disk in a ruined hall, a soft resonance blooms, not a chorus but a single, patient note that lingers in the air. If the right instrument is nearby, that note seems to braid with ambient sound, coaxing a hidden chamber of dialogue from a quest-giver’s scroll or revealing a shuttered mural in the temple’s stone. It isn’t a weapon or armor piece, but it reshapes the way you read the map and notice the small, almost invisible pockets of story tucked between the corners of the world. The track’s value isn’t just in its rarity—it’s in the way it makes a simple walk through a ruin feel like stepping into a longer history. When the market breathes, the Saddlebag Exchange is where many find it first. A careful seller will describe the disk in hushed tones, as if you’re buying a plot twist rather than a piece of metal and glaze. Prices shift with the seasons, with rumors of temple caches and dragon-sightings, so a buyer learns to listen for the strings behind the numbers, the way a storyteller listens for the pauses in a room full of watchers. They’ll tell you that the Veins of the Dragon is not merely beautiful—it’s a doorway: nothing more, nothing less, yet enough to make a quiet day feel suddenly wide, as if you’ve stepped into a corridor that expands with every heartbeat you share with the concealed memory of a dragon.