Seventeen new sets have found their way into the realm — three hundred and fifty-seven pieces in all, twenty-one to a set. Twelve weapons, four suits of armour, five accessories, each set painted as one matched kit so that a Stoneheart axe and a Stoneheart cuirass visibly came out of the same workshop.
Nine are drawn from the elements. Four mark where a hero stands between light and dark. Four more are rarer things, and stranger.
Here they are.
The Elements
Tidecaller Regalia
Pearl scale over bronze gone green with salt, and sashes that drift as though there were a current in the room. It is always faintly damp, however long since it last saw water. The salvage divers who brought it up will tell you, if you buy the round, that the plate was cut from something that was never armour to begin with.
Stoneheart Bulwark
Quarried, not forged. Slabs of rough granite banded in hammered iron, a glyph chiselled into every face, and moss still living in the joints. It is heavier than a person ought to be able to carry and slower than anyone would like — and nothing that has ever hit it has moved it.
Zephyr Weave
Layered silk in dove grey and bone, feather trim at the cuffs, cord where a buckle should be. There is not one piece of metal in the whole kit, and that is the entire idea: nothing to catch, nothing to slow you, nothing to weigh on the shoulder at the end of a long road. Nothing to stop a blade, either.
Stormbrand Harness
Scorched leather threaded with copper filigree, and gaps left open in the plate on purpose so that the charge has somewhere to jump. The burn marks are not damage. They are the last several times it worked.
Rimeglass Vestments
Plate cut from frozen glass, thick and faceted, with the quilted underlayer showing straight through it. Light goes into the armour and comes out somewhere it should not. It is the most beautiful thing in this list and it will not save you — the cuirass gives half the protection of honest steel, and the blade that comes with it hits twice as hard.
Verdant Bloomguard
Grown rather than made: living bark laced with vine, moss packed into the joins, white and pink shoots breaking out at the shoulder in spring. It has to be watered. Whoever wears it stops arguing about that fairly quickly.
Blightweave Shroud
Stained wrapping over boiled leather, hung with green glass vials on brass caps and rubber tubing. The stains are layered — different spills, different years, and the alchemist who owned it kept no notes. Nobody borrows it twice.
Ironsworn Aegis
Riveted, unadorned, dented, and entirely without pretence. No engraving, no gems, no motif, nothing to catch a bard's eye. Every mark on it was put there by use and every repair is still visible. The most honest armour in the realm, and quite possibly the best.
Runespire Mantle
Hard geometric facets in deep violet, with angular sigils holding their formation a finger's width off the surface. They do not touch the plate. They do not drift. Watching them for very long is discouraged, and the people who discourage it will not say why.
Where You Stand
Four sets for the space between the lantern and the dark — and being dark is not the same as being damned.
Dawnwarden Panoply
White-gold, clean-surfaced, a restrained sunburst struck at the centre of each piece. Issued, numbered, maintained, and handed back when the wearer is finished with it. Its power is institutional rather than divine, and it is no less effective for that.
Duskshroud Vigil
Matte black that swallows the light, muted silver rubbed down so it will not catch a lantern, every bright edge wrapped in cloth. There is nothing occult about it whatsoever. It is a night-worker's kit, it is very good at being uninteresting, and that is the highest compliment it wants.
Seraphim Ordinance
Bone-white plate carved as though from ivory, layered feathers at every collar and cuff, a six-winged crest on the largest face of each piece, and a ring of pale gold hanging where no hook holds it. It does not sit still on the rack.
Abyssal Covenant
Plate fused with flesh at the seams, horn spurs pushing out through the shoulders, sigils branded into the surfaces and still warm to the touch. Chains through pierced metal where straps should be. It was not so much put on as agreed to.
Rarer Things
Nullbound Cerement
Colourless wrappings over a shape that never quite fills them, fraying into nothing at the hem. There is no hue in the grey at all — not cold, not warm, not anything. Look directly at the edge and you will not be able to say where it stops.
Sanguine Diadem
Crimson lacquer in smooth, wet-looking coats over dark iron, lined in red velvet, thorned along every edge and ridge. Aristocratic rather than butcherly. It is kept very clean, which is somehow worse.
Fractured Crown
Mismatched, broken, and badly rejoined. No two pieces share a metal or a century, no piece mirrors itself, and the seams stand proud where the plates were forced back together. Nothing about it agrees with anything else, including itself.
Ancestral Reliquary
Carved wooden masks worked into every piece, hung with bundles of beads, teeth and knotted cord, over ceremonial cloth washed pale by a great many years. It is older than whoever is wearing it, and it never entirely stops making a small noise.
Every set sits at epic rarity and asks for level twelve. They turn up as loot, in the hands of people who would rather keep them, and occasionally on a shop counter at a price that should worry you.
Go and find one.