Hourglass of Love Lost

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Hourglass of Love Lost


Aura Strong enchantment (compulsion) and necromancy; CL 15th
Slot —; Price 48,000 gp; Weight 2 lbs.

DESCRIPTION

This delicate hourglass is formed from pale rose-tinted crystal, its glass subtly pink-hued, framed in tarnished silver filigree shaped like intertwined lovers. Within, faintly glowing iridescent sand in deep blood-red and muted crimson tones slowly falls from the upper chamber.

Upon first handling the hourglass, the bearer is instinctively filled with an understanding of its primary function: that it allows the perfect reliving of a cherished moment shared with a beloved individual. This knowledge is absolute and intuitive.

This insight conveys nothing of the item’s curse, limitations, or long-term consequences.

Once per day, up to a maximum of four times per month, the bearer may activate the hourglass by speaking the name of a beloved creature with whom they share (or once shared) a genuine emotional bond. Upon activation, the hourglass immediately inverts and begins to drain for exactly one hour.

The flow of sand cannot be halted, slowed, accelerated, or otherwise altered by any means. Turning the hourglass does not interrupt or reset the effect - it merely reorients the vessel, causing the sand to continue falling in the same direction relative to the effect already in progress. No force, mundane or magical, can pause or end the hourglass’s function once it has begun.

During this time, the user is overwhelmed by a perfect recollection of a single moment of profound happiness shared with that individual. This memory is relived with flawless clarity - every sensation, word, and emotional nuance restored as though it were happening anew. While under this effect, the user is considered fascinated (Will DC 18 negates, though most willingly fail), unable to take actions except those required for basic self-preservation.

When the final grain of sand falls, the curse manifests. The memory remains permanently accessible with perfect clarity; however, all emotional resonance tied to that specific moment is irrevocably stripped away. The recollection becomes sterile, clinical, and devoid of warmth. No magic short of wish or miracle can restore the emotional connection to a memory once consumed in this way.

Each activation inflicts a cumulative -1 penalty to all Charisma-based checks and Charisma-based skill checks made toward the named individual (or their memory, if deceased). This represents the gradual erosion of emotional connection. These penalties stack and cannot be removed except by wish or miracle.

After the hourglass has been used a total of 10 times on memories involving the same individual, the user permanently loses all capacity to feel love, devotion, or emotional attachment toward that creature. This effect cannot be dispelled or removed by any means short of wish or miracle, and even then only with the willing participation of the affected creature.

The Hourglass of Love Lost is immune to all forms of damage and cannot be affected by dispel magic, mage’s disjunction, or similar effects. The hourglass can only be destroyed by a wish, miracle, or similarly powerful reality-altering effect (such as alter reality). Destroying the hourglass does not restore any emotions or undo any of its effects.

The hourglass silently tracks its total uses per individual, though this tally is not visible to the bearer.

LORE

Scholars disagree on whether the Hourglass of Love Lost was created, discovered, or allowed to exist.

Arcane examination consistently reveals faint ties to Ravenloft - a place where suffering is shaped with deliberate and intimate precision. Yet the hourglass is no longer bound to that dread domain. It has slipped beyond its origin, carried into other worlds like something discarded… or perhaps something that escaped.

It appears without pattern or warning. Inheritance chests. Forgotten collections. Quiet market stalls. No record reliably traces its passage from one owner to the next. Attempts to contain or destroy it have almost universally failed. In rare documented cases where it has been unmade through reality-altering magic, its absence has proven… temporary, with accounts suggesting similar objects later surface elsewhere under different circumstances.

More troubling still, the hourglass retains the cruel intentionality of its place of origin, yet now acts without context or judgment. Its effects are not tailored, nor earned. It does not seek the guilty or the deserving. It offers the same bargain to all: perfect remembrance, without explanation… and without warning.

A small but growing body of scholars believe the hourglass is not unique. They theorize it is one fragment of a greater phenomenon - objects of emotional or metaphysical significance slipping loose from their native realities and drifting between worlds. If this is true, then the Hourglass of Love Lost is not an anomaly.

It is debris.

CONSTRUCTION

Requirements Craft Wondrous Item, modify memory, trap the soul, bestow curse; Cost 24,000 gp, 1,920 XP;
Special The methods required to create the Hourglass of Love Lost are incomplete and possibly unknowable. Even when the listed requirements are met, attempts to replicate the item inevitably fail - or produce inert, nonfunctional imitations. It is widely believed that the true act of creation cannot be reproduced outside its place of origin.

Kelwyn’s Notes

Ah… yes. This one, I fear, I recognize.

There are certain… signatures, shall we say, that cling to objects shaped within the demi-plane of fear, Ravenloft. One does not require divination to sense them. They linger in the intent of the thing - in the particular way it understands suffering, and how precisely it chooses to apply it. This is not cruelty born of impulse. It is authored.

And yet… here it is.

Not bound. Not contained. Not where it ought to be.

Which raises a rather troubling possibility. If such an object may drift free of its native domain - carried, discarded, or perhaps simply released - then one must consider what else might follow in its wake. I am not inclined to believe this an isolated occurrence. The multiverse, I suspect, is not so tidy as we might prefer.

I have begun to think of such things as dimensional flotsam and jetsam - fragments of intent, of suffering, of design, cast loose from the places that first shaped them. Debris, if you will… though I hesitate to use so casual a term for objects of such deliberate cruelty.

You see, the true horror of this device is not merely what it does, but what it implies. That the careful, deliberate miseries of that distant land are no longer confined to it. That they may, on occasion, wash ashore in places wholly unprepared to understand them.

A most unfortunate development.

As for the object itself… it remains elegantly restrained. It offers. It does not demand. It reveals just enough to invite participation, and leaves the rest to hope - that most enthusiastic of accomplices. One might almost admire the restraint, were the outcome not so predictably ruinous.

I would advise caution, of course.

Though I suspect, as ever, that such advice will arrive precisely one use too late.

And if this is indeed but a single fragment… a piece of some greater scattering…

Then I find myself less concerned with this hourglass…

…and rather more concerned with what else may already be out there.

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