The spirit-calling bone

A bone cut over with runes, out of the Barren Lands, where they teach an older kind of magic than the Congress will license. Break it above a corpse and you may put questions to what is left of the person, more of them if you are carrying a piece of the body when you ask.

Yara gave it to the party, and warned them what such magic can open. Work of this kind tears Rifts: ways through to the Beyond, which is not a thing anyone wants standing open near them. She told them, later, not to use it anywhere near a curse-keep. It might make things worse.

Mikhail carried it unbroken for the next four years. It went at last over the body of Rainan Marr, because the party wanted the dead lieutenant’s accomplices named and a name among them they could turn or frame: grave-dirt and bone-dust packed into his mouth to strengthen the rite, the bone cracked, and the corpse drawing breath with a hellish rasp while its eyes came open. It took two nights: the first stirred only the body’s own memory, because the rite wants the skull. The second got them their three questions and the name of the clerk who had arranged everything.

What answers is not the man. It is a shadow of what he remembered, and it unsettled all three of them badly. No Rift opened. That is not the same as none being risked.