Charges:
7
(regains at dawn)
This brass bullseye lantern is blackened as if recovered from a century-old fire, yet its panels are flawless and warm to the touch. Each side is fitted with smoky violet glass etched in fine concentric rings. A narrow silver plate beneath the handle bears hundreds of tiny names, most worn away by handling. Its flame burns without oil, a pale gold at the core and deep blue at the edges. When opened, the lantern casts ordinary light, but every illuminated surface also receives a second shadow: silent, translucent, and always belonging to something that stood there a hundred years before.
Historical Illumination
The lantern sheds bright light in a 30-foot radius and dim light for an additional 30 feet. This light is not extinguished by wind or ordinary water, though it can be suppressed by closing the lantern's hood.
The Hundred-Year Shadow
As an action, you can expend 1 charge and direct the lantern at a point you can see within 60 feet. For 10 minutes, the lantern projects silent, three-dimensional shadows of the creatures, objects, and structures that occupied that point exactly 100 years earlier. The shadows move through their recorded actions, repeating the final 10 minutes of activity that occurred there. The projection can pass through present-day creatures and objects, but it cannot pass through the surface onto which it is cast. A creature examining the shadows has advantage on Intelligence (Investigation) and Wisdom (Perception) checks made to reconstruct historical events, identify former inhabitants, or locate changes to the area. The shadows cannot reveal information that was not observable at that location at the time.
Echoes in the Glass
While the lantern is projecting a historical shadow, you can use a bonus action to focus on one shadow. Until the projection ends, you can hear a faint, indistinct murmur associated with that shadow, allowing you to understand the general emotion and urgency of the scene, but not its words. Once you use this property, you cannot use it again until you finish a long rest.
A Helpful Misremembering
When you finish a long rest while attuned to the lantern, you can ask it to display the shadow of a particular creature, object, or structure that stood at a location you have visited. If that subject was present there 100 years ago, the lantern's next activation prioritizes it, causing its shadow to remain sharply visible even if it was not the most prominent feature of the scene.
Quietly Claimed
The lantern has 7 charges and regains 1d6 + 1 expended charges daily at dawn. If you expend the last charge, roll a d20. On a 1, the lantern becomes inert until the next dawn, when it regains 1 charge.
Curse.
The curse is not apparent until the lantern has been used at least three times. Each time you activate The Hundred-Year Shadow, you must succeed on a DC 15 Wisdom saving throw or gain one Yesterday's Mark, up to three marks. A mark feels useful: while you have at least one, you have advantage on Intelligence (Investigation) checks concerning old buildings, forgotten events, or the identities of historical figures. However, the shadows begin subtly incorporating your movements into their scenes, and strangers who resemble people from the displayed history may briefly mistake you for someone who died a century ago. When you gain your third mark, you become haunted by the lantern's final recorded scene. Whenever you finish a long rest, you must succeed on a DC 15 Wisdom saving throw or be charmed by the lantern until the next dawn. While charmed in this way, you are compelled to return to a location of the lantern's choosing and reenact a portion of the scene shown there, though you are not compelled to knowingly endanger yourself. A successful remove curse spell suppresses the marks and curse for 24 hours but does not remove them. The curse ends permanently only if the lantern is used to witness the exact place where its original maker died, one hundred years after the maker's death, and the bearer willingly extinguishes its flame there.
Lore
Old scholars call the lantern a witness rather than a divination device. It does not show what happened; it shows what the place remembers. Its shadows have exposed buried passages, identified murderers long dead, and revealed that famous monuments were built over older ruins. Superstitious historians insist that the lantern never displays an empty scene. If nothing living stood in a place a century ago, it shows the shadow of the person who was about to arrive.
History
The lantern was created by Ilyra Venn, a royal archivist who believed every battlefield and palace retained a moral record of its past. She forged its frame from brass taken from a ruined observatory and set its glass with powdered lenses from a necromancer's scrying engine. Ilyra vanished while testing it beneath the old capital. A hundred years later, investigators found the lantern beside her perfectly preserved shadow, still reaching toward a sealed door. Every owner since then has praised the lantern for uncovering lost truths, though several disappeared after insisting that one of the shadows had begun to follow them.
