The Requiem Box is a palm-sized music box carved from black walnut that seems perpetually cool to the touch. Its lid is inlaid with a silver image of a sleeping figure beneath a starless sky, while tiny mother-of-pearl notes spiral around the edges. A narrow crystal window reveals a brass cylinder engraved with hundreds of names, many worn nearly smooth. Its winding key is shaped like a skeletal hand, and its delicate comb is made from pale metal that vibrates even when the box is closed. When it plays, no visible pins move; instead, the engraved names briefly glow with blue-white light.
Song of the Remembered
When you finish a long rest, the box plays a soft, intricate melody. The song is the tune that a dead creature most recently hummed, whistled, or sang while thinking fondly of you. The music can be heard only by you and creatures you designate when you open the box. If no dead creature has thought of you fondly since your previous long rest, the box instead plays a silent melody that can be felt as a faint vibration. The box can reproduce the voices and instruments of the dead creature as part of the tune.
Echo of the Departed
While the box is playing, you can concentrate on it as though concentrating on a spell for up to 10 minutes. During that time, you can ask the dead creature associated with the melody one question, as if using the speak with dead spell. The creature can answer only with information it knew in life and can refuse to answer. The creature is not compelled to be truthful, but the music changes discordantly whenever it knowingly lies.
A Door Left Ajar
Once per long rest, when the box plays the song of a dead creature, you can use an action to step into the memory represented by the melody. Until the end of your next turn, you become invisible and intangible, can move through creatures and objects as if they were difficult terrain, and perceive a hazy scene from the dead creature's final year of life. You cannot affect anything in the scene, and if you end your turn inside an object, you are shunted to the nearest unoccupied space and take 4d10 force damage.
The Former Owner's Claim
The box's previous owner, a dead individual known as the First Keeper, wants it returned. Whenever you open the box, there is a 10 percent chance that the First Keeper's ghost appears within 30 feet of it. The ghost cannot attack or be attacked during this manifestation, but it demands the box and offers bargains, threats, or clues to its recovery. If you refuse, it vanishes after 1 minute. Once per seven days, if the box is left unattended for at least 1 hour, it teleports up to 1 mile toward the First Keeper's current location, stopping if carried or held. The box cannot be teleported farther by this property.
Keeper of Last Songs
You have advantage on Wisdom (Insight) checks made to determine whether a creature is grieving, haunted, or concealing a connection to the dead. In addition, you can always identify a melody played by the box as belonging to a particular dead creature once you have heard that creature speak in life or learned its name through the Echo of the Departed property.
Lore
The Requiem Box is said to preserve not the songs the dead sang, but the songs they carried unspoken in their hearts. Every melody is a private remembrance made audible, revealing affection, regret, longing, or forgiveness that death could not silence. Some priests call it a blasphemy against the boundary between life and death. Others believe it is a gift from a forgotten muse who could not bear to let love become entirely quiet.
History
The box was crafted by Ilyra Venn, a mortician's daughter and celebrated composer who built it after her beloved died without ever confessing his love. For two centuries it passed between widows, bereaved monarchs, and adventurers seeking one last word from those they had lost. Its most recent owner was Lord Cauldrin Vale, who used it to find the spirits of political enemies and expose secrets they had carried to the grave. Vale died under mysterious circumstances after the box began playing a melody no one recognized. His ghost now wanders the world searching for the box, insisting that it was stolen from him and that its final song belongs to him alone.
