Macguffin!
“Sort of.” Bigwave pulled out a sketchbook and pencil from his satchel. “Here, let me draw it from you.” He was only okay at drafting, but I got the gist: the Coronet was a circlet, with four narrow bands ascending at each ‘corner’ to connect at the top. “There may be ornamentation,’ he told me. “I don’t know: I’ve only seen sketches myself.”
“Right, I get that. It’s really here, though?”
Bigwave nodded. He reached into his satchel again, this time taking out a leather-wrapped oval shape. “Oh, yeah. Now that we’re so close, I can use this jewel to track the Coronet. At least, it should work…” he trailed off as he unwrapped it with slightly trembling fingers.
Unwrapped, the ‘jewel’ was a smoothed and polished piece of mahogany obsidian, and one of the better examples that I’ve seen. It gets its name from the red veins and blotches that travel through the stone, just below the surface; the orcs call it ‘sanguis mali,’ or ‘evil-blood,’ but the stuff is both perfectly natural, and morally neutral. This example was particularly pretty, and possibly even valuable — but it wouldn’t be worth that much on the hidden market.
Then I got a taste of the power coursing through the iron, and I reassessed my professional opinion. Mahogany obsidian is good for temporarily taking a magical charge, but pieces able to store magic in it for any length of time are considerably rarer. This one smelled full of sorcerous energy, ready to be used, and I wondered where Bigwave had gotten it from originally. It was the sort of item you associate with a real mage, not an adventurer like Bigwave.