Magic Item Almost-Monday

Magic Item Almost-Monday

Persephone’s Cracked Hand-mirror

Once a beautiful gift from a Lord Kinnith, Servitor of one of The Old Lich Kings, to his beloved Persephone, kidnapped from her parent’s home and locked within the walls of his capital city’s great cemetery. The mirror allowed her to converse with the bodies interned therein to alleviate the boredom of being trapped away from the world.  It cracked the day she died.  The mirror itself is simply wrought, made of gold with a oblong viewing surface the size of a genteel lady’s hand.  A single crack runs from the upper left portion to the right side of the mirror near the middle of the viewing surface.

As soon as a corpse is seen within the mirror the one who holds it becomes intuitively aware of the mirror’s magic power.

When a corpse is viewed in the mirror by the person holding it :

That person may ask a single question of the spirit which used to reside in the corpse.  It will answer the question truthfully to the extent of the knowledge it had in life.  The question and answer are telepathic and transcend language. 

The spirit will then ask a single question to the mirror bearer.  They must answer truthfully and without subterfuge, like the spirit did, but must answer aloud in at least a conversational tone.  All those who hear the answer will understand what has been said, regardless of their inability to hear the question or any language barriers.  If the answer is false, incomplete, or veers from the objective truth (at least as far as the bearer knows it) the reflective surface will shatter into a thousand shards.  Although the hand mirror is inherently valuable, being made of gold, the magic within the mirror will be lost forever.

The dead see almost all things, and the spirits have a way of always asking the wrong question, even if doing so requires specific knowledge the creature could not possibly have had in life.