The Ledger of Unspoken Debts

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Artifact Requires Attunement Wondrous Item
Weight 3 lbs
Cost Not available at any price Warden-Chair Dunmore would accept while living. The intelligence value to a political operator -- access to years of suppressed truths in Caernguard's most significant relationships -- makes it effectively priceless to the right buyer. The curse binding it to the attuned holder makes conventional sale impossible in any case.

Magical Properties

Artifact. Records truths that have been deliberately withheld in the presence of the Ledger's attuned holder. Currently held by Warden-Chair Osric Dunmore of Caernguard.

The Ledger of Unspoken Debts is a book of approximately three hundred pages, bound in dark leather that does not match any animal a tanner has been able to identify. The pages are blank when purchased, and remain blank when examined by anyone who is not attuned to it. The attuned holder sees text -- in their own handwriting, in their own language, in their own abbreviations and shorthand -- recording things they were never told.

The Ledger was not made by any known smith, artificer, or Order-affiliated mage. Its provenance is one of the questions Warden-Chair Dunmore has been quietly investigating since he found it in a sealed room in Caernguard's administrative archives, behind a door that the city's own records indicated had been sealed for over four hundred years. The room contained nothing else. Whether the Ledger was placed there deliberately or simply accumulated in the archive the way old cities accumulate things -- by outlasting everyone who knew what it was -- he has not determined.

He has been attuned to it for seven years. He has told no one he has it. The text it has written in his handwriting in that time has made him the best-informed person in Caernguard about what Caernguard actually contains, which is saying something, because he was already very well-informed before he found it. It has also made him deeply and permanently uncomfortable about the nature of truth in social situations, because the Ledger does not record lies -- it records the things that are true that people chose not to say. The entries are almost always more unsettling than the lies would have been.

Properties

  • Unspoken Truths: When a creature within 30 feet of the attuned holder deliberately withholds a true statement -- says nothing when they know something relevant, deflects a direct question, or chooses an incomplete answer -- the Ledger records what was withheld. The entry appears in the holder's handwriting within one hour. The Ledger does not record lies, only suppressions of truth.
  • Outstanding Debts: Once per long rest, the attuned holder may open the Ledger and concentrate on a specific creature they have met. If the Ledger has any entries relating to that creature, they are presented in full. If not, the Ledger shows a blank page.
  • Verification: While holding the Ledger, you always know when a creature within 10 feet is speaking a deliberate lie. You do not know what the truth is -- only that the statement is false.
  • The Weight of Knowledge (curse): The Ledger cannot be destroyed by any mundane means and cannot be removed from the attuned holder's possession by any means short of killing them or breaking attunement. Breaking attunement requires a Remove Curse spell at 6th level or higher, after which the Ledger's entries from the holder's attunement period become illegible to them permanently -- but remain legible to the next attuned holder.