Grave-Iron

The land is sick, the iron from it carry the illness.

Grave-Iron is iron smelted from ore in a Darkland, tainted with perpetual decay. Darklands hover on the razor edge between life and death, always dying but never truly dead. It is a place of entropy and everything becomes suffused with necrotic energies, including the ore still in the ground. When it is dredged from the murky depths and made into ingots, it retains its tainted essence. Grave-Iron is exclusively made to make weapons, like the infamous Woe-Blades.

Description

Once smelted, Grave-Iron looks much like iron shot through with streaks of rusty red and blood-splatter patterns of verdigris. It gleams sharply in darkness but becomes a muted, dull grey in sunlight, almost as stone. Raw grave-iron ore is indistinguishable from regular ore, but the mines where it is found are tainted, terrible places where the darkness is long and jagged.
It smells faintly of rust and memories of decaying buildings, old metal and forgotten scrap. It feels wrong to the touch for the living, eliciting the same response as embracing a plague-victim might.

by Rock Cafe.info

Properties

Any sword will cut you dead; why does it have to be so miserable about it?

Grave-Iron has much the same properties as iron when it comes to sharpness and strength, but is infused with decay. Cuts from Grave-Iron always become infected and in the worst possible way. Gangrene and disease follow strife where Grave-Iron weapons are used like maggots to a rotting corpse. Deep strikes from a Woe-Blade even spawn Grave Grub within the wound.

Grave-Iron is difficult to work with and it resists artifice. It heats slowly and releases venomous fumes as it melts. Only the undead have any hope of working the metal without disaster.
Anything larger than a sword soon begins to fall apart from the its own rotting essence. Only the most skilled can coax grave-iron into larger shapes and such structures are terrifying focal points of necromatic power.

Prolonged use by mortal hands bring misery and illness, while ingestion results in some of the most terrible deaths. Outside the Darklands where the sun's light is dim and weak, Grave-Iron is ruined by sunlight. Things made from Grave-Iron quickly dull and rust, crumbling apart under the sun.

Uses

Grave-Iron is most commonly used by the Corpse-Empires who thrive in the rotting Darklands. Powers like the Empire of Bones or the Blighted regularly forge and field weapons made from Grave-Iron. In the hands of the already dead, the Woe-Blades become terrible scourges. It is only their link and reliance to the Darklands that limit its reach.
Outside the Darklands, Grave-Iron is much more rare. It is used either by the damned, the mad or the utterly amoral, usually kept in heavy lead caskets when not used. Assassins favor Grave-Iron greatly, as even a nick can spell certain doom.

Darklands
Darklands are places where the realm of the dead and living merge. It is a land in decay though never truly dead, shrouded in perpetual gloom and haunted by undead terrors. Darklands are rare and the cataclysms that create them thankfully few.
Read More About Darklands

Grave-Steel

Grave-Iron can't be refined into steel without its essence being diminished or even lost. Even coal taken from a Darkland muddle whatever energies that bind entropy into the metal, until it becomes little more than rust-prone steel.

Arcane Potential

Grave-Iron is a relatively low-tier magic material, but it has use in any ritual that call upon forces of decay or entropy. Binding circles, grave-iron powder or harvesting implements from the metal all see use by necromancers and their ilk.
Magical augments crafted for the undead are often made from Grave-Iron, either as separate pieces or grafted right onto the rotting flesh and animated bone.

Necromancer or not, any mortal who use Grave-Iron must take care. Even the slightest cut or inhaled powder can spell doom while long exposure to it bring slow, agonizing death.

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