This square of ivory linen is thin enough to see candlelight through, yet never frays or stains. Fine silver, blue, and rose-gold thread forms a map across its surface: coastlines, mountain chains, city marks, and tiny roads that shift whenever the cloth is unfolded. Each place where a tear has fallen is marked by a minute glass bead, colored according to the emotion behind the tear. Along one edge runs a narrow embroidered border of unfinished script, whose words become readable only to its attuned bearer.
Map of Tears
The handkerchief bears a constantly shifting embroidered map showing every place where it has absorbed a creature's tears. While attuned, you can study the map for 1 minute to identify the direction and approximate distance to any location depicted on it, provided that location is on the same plane of existence. You also know whether the depicted tears were shed from grief, joy, fear, relief, or pain.
Merciful Cloth
As an action, you can press the handkerchief against a creature within your reach and absorb one visible tear or soothe one bout of weeping. The creature gains temporary hit points equal to your proficiency bonus and has advantage on its next saving throw against being frightened or charmed within the next hour. Once this property is used, it can't be used again until the next dawn.
Roads Remembered
While carrying the handkerchief, you have advantage on Wisdom (Survival) checks made to navigate toward a location shown on its map. In addition, you can cast augury once per day without material components, but the omen always concerns the welfare of a creature whose tears are recorded on the handkerchief, chosen by the DM.
The Small Obligation
When you finish attuning to the handkerchief, a single unresolved obligation appears embroidered along its border in thread only you can read. The DM determines the obligation, which must be specific, achievable, and small enough to complete during an adventure, such as delivering a message, returning a keepsake, offering an apology, or comforting a named stranger. Until you fulfill it, you can't benefit from the handkerchief's Roads Remembered property, and whenever you finish a long rest, you must succeed on a DC 13 Wisdom saving throw or awaken with one level of exhaustion. The obligation changes to a new one when completed. If you knowingly abandon an obligation, the handkerchief becomes nonmagical for you until you make amends in a manner approved by the DM.
Borrowed Consolation
Once per long rest, when you or a creature within 30 feet fails a saving throw against being frightened, charmed, or stunned, you can use your reaction to draw the handkerchief through the air. The failing creature can reroll the saving throw and must use the new result. Afterward, the handkerchief displays a new point on its map and records a tear from the creature whose fate was altered.
Lore
The handkerchief is said to remember sorrow without judging it. Sailors claim its map includes the deck of a ship lost beneath the western sea, while priests insist that one bead marks a tear shed in heaven. It does not merely record grief; it preserves moments when a heart was changed by grief, joy, fear, relief, or pain.
History
The cloth was embroidered over seventy years by Maelin Vey, a wandering hospice-keeper who carried it from battlefield to battlefield. She used it to dry the tears of the dying and the newly spared, adding a thread for every place where it had been used. After Maelin disappeared while fulfilling an obligation to a child she had never met, the handkerchief passed through the hands of pilgrims, spies, monarchs, and adventurers. Each owner completed one small kindness before the cloth accepted another.
