Shards: The Currency of a Broken World

Guiding Philosophy & Origin: A Shard is not a coin; it is a scream, frozen in stone. It is the ultimate expression of the world's brokenness. Shards are not minted in a proud forge; they are the literal, physical shrapnel of the Sundering, the shattered, obsidian bones of the mountains where the Primordial of Sorrow died. Their guiding philosophy is the most honest and brutal in all of Veridia: survival. A Shard does not represent wealth; it represents a hot meal in a cold world. It does not represent power; it represents the price of not getting your throat slit for one more night. It is the currency of the gutter and the grave, a tangible piece of the god's tombstone that the common folk use to buy another breath.
Appearance: A Shard is a jagged, sharp fragment of black obsidian and dark, unrefined iron. No two are alike. They range from the size of a fingernail to the palm of a hand. Their edges are sharp enough to cut skin, and their surface is a dull, non-reflective black, feeling heavy and dead in the hand. They are crude, functional, and utterly devoid of artistry, each one a small, ugly piece of a much larger, more beautiful tragedy. They feel cold to the touch, not with the magical cold of an Aegis, but with the simple, honest cold of a forgotten tomb.
The Mundane Economy (Who Uses It & Why): Shards are the lifeblood of the common folk, the gears of the great, grinding machine of daily life.
- The Commoner: This is the only currency they will ever know. It is the price of a loaf of Dust-Bread, a mug of watered-down ale in a place like The Gutter Rose, or a quick, desperate fuck in a back alley in Port Despair.
- The Iron Tyranny: The empire uses Shards to pay its low-level legionaries, a constant, grinding reminder of their low station and their dependence on the state for their very survival.
- The Underworld: In the chaotic markets of Hollowgate and Port Despair, all low-level transactions are conducted in Shards. The value is not stable; it is chaotic, determined by the whim of a local warlord like Warden Rost or the needs of a pirate captain. A bucket of Shards might buy you a rusty sword one day and a half-eaten rat the next.
The Unflinching Truth (The "Harvest"): The official story is that Shards are "scavenged" from the slopes of the Obsidian Peaks. This is a beautiful, terrible lie. The truth is a form of penal labor known as "Shard-Breaking." The Iron Tyranny and other powers of the Barren Lands sentence their worst criminals, their most useless debtors, and their most defiant political prisoners to the Shard-Breaker camps in the foothills of the mountains.
This is not mining. It is a death sentence. The prisoners are given massive, iron-headed hammers and are forced to smash the super-hard, cursed obsidian of the mountainside. The work is a symphony of beautiful, terrible, and gory horror. The obsidian does not break cleanly; it explodes, sending a shower of razor-sharp shrapnel into the air. A man's eye is a common price for a single, good-sized Shard. The air is thick with the screams of men as the black, glassy shrapnel tears through their flesh, embedding itself in their arms, their faces, their very souls.
A prisoner's hands, after a week of this work, are not hands anymore. They are raw, bloody stumps, the skin worn away, the bones visible beneath. They work until they collapse from exhaustion, until a shard takes their life, or until their hands are so broken they can no longer hold the hammer. Their bodies are then simply left to the Carrion Scuttlers, their own broken bones just another part of the beautiful, terrible landscape.
Every single Shard in the pocket of a common man is a piece of a prisoner's soul. It has been paid for not with gold, but with the beautiful, terrible, and absolute currency of a human life, broken on the anvil of a dead god's sorrow.