Black amethyst pendant

The black amethyst pendant is an object of the Sürgün Günlükleri ("Exile Chronicles") campaign: a pendant of black stone that a devil left behind when it was defeated in an abandoned, haunted stone town. A mage had filled it with power enough to imprison the devil in a space between two veils.^{1 2}

The devil of the stone town

Varis, the companion of the witch hunter Gordon, told of a devil and its hellhounds that tormented the souls trapped in the town. A thick veil kept them from dragging the souls down to hell, but the same veil, or crystal, also kept the souls from passing on. If it were torn, devil, hounds and souls would all stand on the same plane, and the souls would have to be shielded while the foe was stopped.^{3 4}

The devil showed itself to the company as a translucent figure covered in spikes, armoured, with eyes of flame and two great swords. It said it only played with the dead, warned that it could come to them if the veil were opened, said it looked forward to the meeting, and vanished.⁵

When the veil opened, the devil read in Kemp Corvus's glance that the souls by the lake mattered to the company and set its hounds on them. It set its swords alight and fought Kemp in a long duel, while its hounds bit and breathed hellfire. Kemp fell, and the devil turned on Katherine; she gripped her own pendant and struck it with three bolts of magic, and the devil, unable to keep its hold on the burning ground, vanished cursing and left behind a black object.^{6 7 8 9 1}

The stone

It was later to be learned that the stone came from dwarven mines and from one particular family, and that the hidden owner of a ring set with the same stone had taken an interest in the company (see Man with the black amethyst ring).¹⁰

Ephorus carried the stone while he searched for its source. A jeweller told him that amethyst is valuable and durable but holds no magic of its own, and that the black kind is far rarer than the ordinary purple. Black amethyst is used in dwarven and gnomish engineering to keep the flow of magic apart in automatons and golems. An old mage held that lead alloys and counter-magic were better suited to trapping a spell, and explained the amethyst's use as separating magic from contact.^{11 12 13}

Ephorus also found a book on the symbolic meaning of stones, written by a priest as a pastime. It gives black amethyst another name, and records a legend in which a device for seeing and hearing, made of this stone, was used to sow discord among the commanders of the dark side; such a device, it was noted, could be made of other materials too.^{14 15}

The powder within

In Gromkar a local expert said the black stone was neither much loved nor much traded, and that few apart from the dwarves mined it. He suggested that it might be a casing hiding something inside, which a harder tool of diamond or mithril could break open; to fill such a stone and seal it again unnoticed, he added, would take very great skill or power.^{16 17}

Ephorus asked a dwarf with a mithril hammer for help. The dwarf struck the stone again and again, and at about the third blow its lower part broke open, showing a hollow filled with white powder. The powder gave off a fresh, pleasant scent like grass and rain, and was found to be no ordinary substance of this plane nor simple stone dust; its source could not be told at first sight.^{18 19 20}