The Mól water-control basin

A Mól device for the commanding of water and of the creatures of water: a wide basin fed by electrum filigree run through the pillars of the hall around it. The hall was found long before anyone could read it: dust-choked, its pillars collapsed and carved with the sigils of Water, Steam and Salt, with Ice and Slime marked once each, and the marks of d’Ouhb and Luhthar among them. What trickled into the basin was thick as syrup and was not water.

It took Mikhail a night of study to get the answer out of the filigree. The runes form a control array rather than the containment arrays the Mól set against elementals elsewhere, and the thing answers to a legend the bardic colleges keep: a bowl, or a basin, or whatever the telling makes it, that grants true command of water and of water-elementals. The basin is less equivocal than the legend. A vial lifted out of it pours as ordinary water once away from the room, and the flask comes back dry, everything on its outside pulled home behind it.

None of it works. The broken pillars severed the conduit feeding the basin, and mending it wants a master who can meld stone and metal both, or magic to the same end. The basin itself is far too large to carry anywhere. Mikhail is not convinced it was ever meant to command only the water in front of it. A later reading makes the hall one point in a Mól sacred geometry, a bowl of commanding water worked from some other site entirely, which would leave the room a lock with its key somewhere else. Mended, it might charge crystals, or push the water’s reach outward and draw it back.

Broken, the hall still answers to planar things. The party brought Gwenivere down into it to test whether the site was what had been draining her, and instead the crown of Mól electrum Aldo was wearing turned from one kind of magic to another while he stood there. A hidden compartment in the room was marked for investigation and has not been opened since.