Rotten Meat

Rotten Meat hangs from a battered hook, a slab the color of dried marrow, its surface slick with treacly grease that darkens at the edges. The skin flays back in places, exposing fibrous pink beneath, like folded parchment that forgot to dry. A curl of pale mold travels along the rim, damp as moss, and the scent climbs in a sharp, coppery thread that sticks to the back of your throat. The texture is stubbornly tacky, yet the fibers beneath give with a brittle snap when pressed, as if the flesh remembers the moment it was torn from a carcass and insists you acknowledge the long road it endured. A ring of pale maggots circles the center, moving with patient rhythm, as if waiting for a forgetful traveler to drop a crumb. Whispers say its lineage is older than the market itself: a failed caravan perched on the Dust Gate road, raiders circling like birds, and a hunter who saved the last scraps for some later, desperate cook in a camp that never slept. The meat travels with the weather—heat makes the stink bolder, rain ghosts the stain across leather, and the memory of its presence lingers long after you’ve passed the stall. It is not a prize, not even a luxury, yet in lean times it becomes a practical thread in the fabric of life: a sturdy base for a no-nonsense stew, a blunt lure to draw carrion birds for a quick harvest, a starter for stubborn experiments in the alleys of alchemy where decay flowers into amber vapors. It might be the only thing left on a hungry night that still breathes enough to remind you you’re alive. Prices pulse with the market’s breath and, on some days, with the mood of weather-bound caravans. That is the tempo that leads you to Saddlebag Exchange, a boulevard of canvas and rope where traders hook their wares with quiet intensity. A lean, weathered woman named Kira stacks rotten meat beside salted hides, her fingers thumb valves on a battered coin purse as she weighs the meat against copper scraps and a handful of dried thyme. She tells you the going rate shifts with the season: cheap in a drought, dear when the coast road brings in fresh stashes, and never far from the rumor of a raid that leaves everyone scanning the horizon for a new stockpile. In her ledger, Rotten Meat sits under “camp provisions,” a stark reminder that value is not just flavor but survival, barter and memory braided into a single, smelly thread. Some buyers want it for the stock pot, some for an improvised trap, some for the old alchemist’s experiments that insist decay has a lesson to teach. The piece ends where it began: in the dim warmth of trade, where the world’s appetite keeps turning, and Rotten Meat keeps its stubborn place on a hook, stubborn as a story you tell at dusk—the tale of hunger, travel, and a market that never forgives forever.