Electrum / Mól crown

A circlet of electrum in Mól filigree, set with two white stones and a pink one at its center. It came wrapped out of a hidden vault in the Twisted Grove, and when the company put a seeing over everything it carried, the crown came back strongest of the lot: a transmutation, and a considerable one.

Worn, it lifts two faculties of the mind at once: a man’s bearing, and either his learning or his judgment. Whether that second one is fixed in the metal or settles on whatever the wearer is short of, accounts differ. It wants a full day and night of unbroken wear before it takes, and holds a day after it comes off; taken off early it leaves the wearer dulled and thick until he has rested. Everyone who has tried it has come away with a headache. Being made as strongly as it is, it also leaves its wearer tender to abjuration, one of the reasons the Arcane Congress prefers such things locked away where nobody has to think about them.

None of which is what it was made for. It is the Muharib’s, worn on the brow of the clan chief, and its proper work is planar: it attunes whoever wears it to whatever realm he means to walk, so that a sky of fire or a sea of magma only singes the brow, and then lets him breathe the air and stand on the ground. The Muharib held the gateways against what came through them, and a chief who could follow through one was a chief who could hold it. It did that work again at the death-tree’s root boundary in the Grove, blending Mikhail into the plane of negative energy well enough that he could walk the root chamber unharmed, call a crystal of that plane to himself, and work it loose with his lute.

Its name was slower coming than its use. The Elder called it only a noble’s crown, possibly a Muharib’s; the Crown of Echoing Steel came out of a decoded volume a year later, the steel of it being electrum.

It nearly broke the company on the day it was found. Aldo and Koa both wanted it, Aldo argued it would help break the curse, which was untrue and Koa knew it was untrue, and Mikhail said out loud that this is how parties end. They settled at halves. Aldo then rigged a coin-flip and gave it to Mikhail, and it has been Mikhail’s ever since, which is not the same as saying it has been on Mikhail’s head. Aldo wore it for a year, and it is his brow it sits on in most of the tellings: three rumors a week set running instead of two, and a headache for the third. It was on his brow, too, in the basin hall beneath the Crack, when its aura turned from enhancement to summoning and stayed printed on his forehead until he left the room. What the altered crown does has never been identified. Elliot took it away to study and wore it daily for safekeeping, Koa borrowed it back for an evening, and Mikhail has worn it himself since.

It does not go into a town undisguised. There are men who claim Muharib descent (Torgun Kurvroc among them) who would know it on sight.