The Remembrance Music Box

by Frazer 👁 70 views

This small music box is fashioned from dark walnut polished to a mirror sheen. Its lid bears an inlaid silver image of two figures separated by a winding line of musical notes, while tiny mother-of-pearl stars glitter across its surface. The brass winding key is shaped like a reaching hand. Inside, a delicate steel cylinder turns beneath a comb of blackened silver teeth, though no visible mechanism produces the impossible, breathlike humming that accompanies its music. When opened, the box is cool to the touch and faintly smells of rain on old stone.

The Unfinished Humming When the box is opened, it plays a soft, wordless melody for 1 minute. The melody is the song or tune that a deceased creature most often hummed when thinking fondly, regretfully, or wistfully of the attuned creature. If more than one deceased creature qualifies, the box plays the melody of the one whose memory is strongest at that moment. The box is silent if no deceased creature ever thought of the attuned creature in this way. The melody cannot be copied by mundane means, though a creature can attempt a DC 15 Intelligence (Arcana) check to reproduce it after hearing it three times.

A Memory in Every Note While the music plays, the attuned creature has advantage on Wisdom (Insight) checks made to recall, interpret, or understand its relationship with the deceased creature whose melody is being played. The attuned creature can also recognize the deceased creature's voice if it hears that voice through speak with dead or another magical effect.

The Last Refrain Once per dawn, while the box is playing a deceased creature's melody, the attuned creature can ask one question concerning that creature's death or final days. The answer arrives as a change in the melody: a minor, wordless musical impression that conveys a truthful but symbolic answer at the GM's discretion. The answer cannot reveal information the deceased creature did not know.

The Collector Knows Somewhere in the world, a mysterious collector knows the music box's exact location. This knowledge is supernatural: the collector can determine the box's direction and distance while it is on the same plane of existence, regardless of mundane concealment. The collector does not automatically know who possesses it or what the attuned creature looks like, but magical effects that hide the box from divination also conceal its location from the collector.

Lore

The box is said to preserve not a song, but the space left behind when someone remembers the dead. Its melodies are never quite complete; each ends just before the remembered person would have spoken the listener's name. Some believe the box was made by a bereaved composer who could not bear to forget the voices of the dead. Others claim it was built by Death's personal archivist and misplaced among mortal keepsakes.

History

The Remembrance Music Box was first recorded in the collection of Lady Ilyra Voss, a noblewoman who purchased it from a ferryman with no reflection. After opening it, she heard the childhood humming of her murdered brother and spent the rest of her life seeking the killer. When the box vanished from her locked estate, every member of her household reported hearing its melody beneath their beds for seven nights. The current whereabouts of the box are unknown, though an obsessive antiquarian known only as the Collector is said to have followed it across three kingdoms.

Created by Frazer 👁 70 views