The Tome of Ancient Lore

The Tome of Ancient Lore is a rare tome in Landorya. Its known origin is The Tome of Ancient Lore was compiled over three generations by the Desert Scholar arcane-librarians known as the Pale Quorum, who dispatched envoys to the Naga delta-courts, the Fey Court of the Eternal Twilight, and the sky-citadels of the Zephyrians to gather lore that no single civilization had preserved whole. Its binding was completed by the master-bookwright Selvara of Dun Kashar during the Year of the Twin Moons, when she sealed the final page with a drop of her own blood to bind the tome's shifting script to the living rather than the dead.. Its most cited abilities include Grants the reader fluent comprehension of any written language native to Landorya, including extinct scripts of the Eldorians and the pre-Sundering Celestial Order glyphs., Allows the tome to project ghostly illusions of the historical events it describes, filling the air around the reader with silent, translucent scenes drawn from Landorya's past., and Contains transcribed spell-formulas attributed to Naga venom-weavers and Desert Scholar astromancers alike, a reader who spends a full lunar cycle studying it may permanently internalize one minor arcane formula.. Accounts also warn of a drawback: A reader who attempts to memorize more than seven pages in a single sitting begins to experience involuntary recall, waking visions of events they did not witn…

For two centuries the Tome rested in the Pale Quorum's vaulted sanctum beneath the city of Dun Kashar, consulted by Desert Scholar delegations and, on three recorded occasions, by Sphinx emissaries who descended from the Sun-Scarred Peaks specifically to pose their riddles to its pages. During the Ashfall Wars it was smuggled north by the scholar-exile Torrean the Eyeless to prevent its capture by the Drakonian advance, and in that flight it passed briefly through the hands of a Halfling river-merchant named Cobb Thistlewick, who reportedly read a single page and wept for a week without being able to explain why. It was recovered by the Order of the Starlight after the Armistice of Veyn's Bridge, who held it for forty years, studying its Aether-resonant passages, before the Desert Scholars formally reclaimed it through the Conclave of Reckoning. Today it is housed in the Grand Athenaeum of Dun Kashar under a triple-sealed crystal reliquary, and access is granted only to petitioners who can answer three questions posed by the Athenaeum's own Sphinx-trained door-wardens.