Recipe: Verata's Epaulets sits on a sun-warmed desk, a brittle parchment card etched with ink that has begun to creep along the margins, its corners curled like dry leaves. The page carries a delicate border of sigils and spirals, a line drawing of shoulder plates that seems almost alive in the flicker of candlelight. The ink has a bluish warmth, as if the pattern itself hums with a memory of heat and hammering. A faded wax seal, still pliable with age, bears the maker’s mark—a small shield flanked by laurel leaves—hinting at a workshop where voices once rose over the clang of metal. Touching the parchment, you feel the grain of the fibers, a stubborn weave that makes the recipe feel more like a map than a pattern. The texture is rough in places, smoother where a careful hand has pressed the page flat for display in a merchant’s cabinet. The instructions lean toward craft and discipline: a sequence of steps, a choreography of leather, plate, and thread, stitched with a patience that remembers windstorms and long road-trips between forges. The design itself is elegant and practical, a pair of epaulets that would sit proud on a courier’s shoulder yet bear the weight of a frontline scout—the kind of armor that tells a story before the wearer says a word. Lore threads weave through the illustration. Verata’s Epaulets are named for a long-remembered patron of armorers, a figure who moved between markets and mountains, collecting local techniques and fables alike. The recipe is said to be a distilled memory of that era: a blend of seamwork precision and metallurgic habit, a pattern that would survive change in the city’s guard and in the hands of those who mend mail as though it were a living history. Some say the epaulets carried more than a shield’s scent of oil; they carried the promise that a single craftsman’s craft could outlast a thousand rumors. The page hints at a lineage—of workshops that endured sieges, of veterans who kept their word in the quiet pull of a needle and a hammer. In gameplay terms, Verata’s Epaulets aren’t just a cosmetic statement. They are a crafted piece that carries the weight of a tradition—the kind that signals a collector’s eye as much as a front-line stance. When assembled, the epaulets become part of a set whose silhouette marries function with form, offering protection and a disciplined elegance that players learn to recognize in the field. The craft itself invites gathering at the forge: mettle, hides, thread, dyes, and the patient rhythm of a master showing you the right angle for a strap, the right curve for a plate to sit against bone and cloth. Market chatter completes the circle. In the bustling stalls of the Saddlebag Exchange, a well-worn copy of the recipe can spark quiet bargaining and careful praise for provenance. Prices drift with stories—occasionally a neat little pile of coins, sometimes a trade for rare hides or a fragment from a legendary set—always a reminder that this is more than a pattern; it’s a link to a past that still clicks into the present when a tailor lifts the needle and the forge catches the light of a new dawn. The page doesn’t just tell you how to sew; it invites you to walk with Verata again, to test your hand against a history that keeps asking to be worn.