The Potion of Undead Slaying sits in the palm of your gloved hand, a small amber vial that catches the candle’s flame and splits it into a dozen tiny suns. Its liquid gleams like honeyed dusk, a viscous gold-green hue that shifts with the angle of light. A wax-sealed stopper bears a faded seal—an emblem of a skull crossed with a crown, perhaps a relic of a long-vanished order that taught weapons to listen to alchemy as much as to steel. The label, carved into parchment and then pressed with a fingerprint of wax, bears no bold marketing, only a quiet inscription: “For the chill of the bone and the gnawing dark.” It feels old and traveled, as if it has passed through a dozen pockets, a handful of smithy chests, and one caravan’s rough saddlebag before arriving in your grip. There’s a texture to the bottle’s surface, a cool patina beneath your skin where the glass meets your hand, and if you tilt the vial just so, you can glimpse a faint, silvery shimmer that seems to rise and fall with the pulse of the world as if the potion were breathing with some long-sleeping memory. lore whispers that its recipe was penned by a nurse-priestess who treated the dying with threads of light and a draught meant to thin the black bleed of necromancy. Some say it was brewed at the edge of a ruined monastery, where the living and dead kept a careful agreement about the price of mercy. The story folds into the present whenever the bottle is opened, and the air inside seems to carry a whisper of old battlefields, of torches guttering beside mausoleums, of necromancers who learned to fear the moment a single drop touches a blade. In practice, the potion’s purpose is straightforward yet potent. When poured and consumed, it endows a temporary harmonizing of will and weapon against undead foes, dulling their grip on the world and sharpening your own edges against them. The effect isn’t a grand enchantment that shouts its power; it’s a precise, surgical boost, a narrowing of the undead’s advantages—armor that clanks too heavily, a chill that sours their breath, instincts sharpened to pierce the veil that binds them. In the field, it reads like a quiet advantage that shifts the tide when you’re staring down wights in a crypt or skirmishing with revenant patrols near frost-bit stones. It doesn’t win battles by itself, but it steadies nerves and clears the way for more decisive blows, a careful reminder that courage paired with a well-timed draught can level a playing field that undead odds would otherwise skew. Market whispers travel with caravans as well as with commerce, and that is how I came to the Saddlebag Exchange, where a trader’s hands move like a practiced melody, trading stories as much as goods. The bottle’s price is not a single number but a negotiation etched into sunlight and shadow, sometimes swinging with scarcity, sometimes with the season’s mood. I traded a handful of dried herbs and a silver coin purse—enough to tempt the shopkeeper who knows that a bottle of this sort can turn a tense night into a safer journey home. In the world, such exchanges make the potion feel less like a trophy and more like a tool—a relic given new breath, a reminder that even the oldest of cures must walk among the living to keep their light alive.