The Apology Needle

by Frazer 👁 67 views

Charges: 3 (regains at dawn)

The Apology Needle is a slender sewing needle of tarnished silver, its point impossibly sharp and its eye shaped like a tear. A spool of gray thread hangs from its base, though the thread never seems to lessen. When drawn through flesh, the thread briefly glows the color of a dying sunset before sinking beneath the skin. Tiny words of apology are engraved along the shaft in several different hands, some of which appear to have been scratched out and rewritten.

Stitch Borrowed Time As an action, you can touch a creature and expend 1 charge to stitch one of its wounds closed. The creature regains 4d8 + 4 hit points, but the healing is borrowed rather than earned. At the next dawn, the creature takes necrotic damage equal to half the hit points restored by this property, rounded down. This damage ignores resistance and immunity, and it cannot reduce the creature below 1 hit point.

Emergency Seam When you touch a creature at 0 hit points, you can expend 1 charge as a bonus action to stabilize it and restore 1 hit point. The creature still incurs a debt of 1d6 necrotic damage, which it takes at the next dawn. This debt damage cannot reduce the creature below 1 hit point.

The Weight of Guilt Whenever you use Stitch Borrowed Time or Emergency Seam, a dark thread appears beneath the recipient's skin and remains until the debt is paid. While a creature bears one or more of these threads, it has disadvantage on death saving throws. A creature can bear only one thread from the needle at a time; using the needle on a creature that already bears a thread removes its existing thread and replaces it with the new one.

A Needle's Mercy The needle can be used as a healer's kit and never runs out of thread. It has no effect on constructs or undead.

Lore

The needle was made by Ilyra Venn, a battlefield seamstress who could not forgive herself for choosing which soldiers to save during a disastrous retreat. She fashioned it from a surgeon's needle, a silver funeral pin, and a strand of her own hair, then begged an imprisoned chronomancer to teach it how to pull a moment of life from the future. The resulting magic saved dozens of people, but every wound closed by the needle remained owed. Those who were healed called it a miracle. Ilyra called it an apology that had not yet been accepted.

History

After Ilyra's death, the needle passed through hospitals, mercenary companies, and grieving families. It was last carried by a young field medic who used its final charge to save an enemy officer during a siege. The officer survived and ended the war, but the medic died before dawn, leaving the needle on the battlefield beside a note that read, "I am sorry it took so long." The spool has never run empty since.

Created by Frazer 👁 67 views