Crenshinibon

Crenshinibon is an evil, sentient artifact in the Forgotten Realms setting based on the Dungeons & Dragons fantasy role-playing game. The item was featured primarily in the novels The Crystal Shard, Passage to Dawn, The Silent Blade, and Servant of the Shard by R.A. Salvatore, though it also appeared as a major plot device in the computer game Icewind Dale.
Properties
Crenshinibon is a vile relic of immense power, a crystal shard that draws its magical energy from the light of the sun. Crenshinibon is a sentient , and it possesses a never-ending hunger for power and glory at whatever cost. It always desires a powerful wielder, usually a corruptible magic-user of some sort, and greatly enhances that wielder’s powers. The Crystal Shard also insidiously manipulates its wielder and would readily abandon him or her for someone more capable of furthering its goals of ultimate conquest. The relic can lure in thousands of evil-intentioned beings with its magical call, creating a grand army for its wielder and so-called master.
Perhaps Crenshinibon's most magnificent ability is its power to create an enormous crystalline tower, known as Cryshal-Tirith (Elvish, literally meaning crystal tower). In order to create the tower, Crenshinibon first creates an exact duplicate of itself, a square-sided crystal that sometimes glows a green light. The wielder then places the copy of the shard on the ground and recites the words ibssum dal abdur. The duplicate crystal expands, growing into the crystalline tower, still an exact image of Crenshinibon, only now of mammoth proportions. The tower itself absorbs the sun’s light, giving it more strength during the daytime. The tower is impervious; it absorbs all attacks against its mirrored walls and reflects them back on their source. The only vulnerable part of the tower is its heart, the pulsating crystal of strength that was used to construct the tower, and that becomes hidden away within Cryshal-Tirith. The tower’s very door is invisible and undetectable to any beings inherent to the present plane the tower rests upon.
The nature of the artifact is to attain power to its greatest level. This desire transcends the normally established boundaries of what is right and what is wrong.
The Shard's primary attack is on the ego, collecting slaves with promises of greatness and riches. It has little hold on paladins and goodly priest, on righteous kings and noble peasants but one who desires more and is not above deception and destruction to further his ends will inevitably sink into Crenshinibon's grasp.
Crenshinibon has had other owners since that time. In the novel The Crystal Shard, the next wielder of Crenshinibon was a fumbling wizard-in-training named Akar Kessel. He stumbled upon the artifact at the Spine of the World Mountains. Though he could barely cast cantrips himself, with the power of Crenshinibon he was almost unstoppable. Kessel tried to use Crenshinibon's power to enslave the whole region and even summoned the demon Errtu to help him with that task. But this supposed ally finally brought about the demise of Akar Kessel, having his own designs for the Crystal Shard. In the end, Kessel was killed by an avalanche caused by Crenshinibon's own heat in a battle with the famed drow ranger Drizzt Do'Urden atop Kelvin's Cairn.
In The Silent Blade, the drow Jarlaxle tricked Drizzt into giving the shard to him by disguising himself as Cadderly Bonaduce and used it to carve himself a place in the city of Calimport. His lieutenant Rai-guy believed he could control the shard better than his leader and tried to take it. It was stolen by Jarlaxle's companion Artemis Entreri, who had managed to ignore the Crystal Shard's manipulative magic through sheer willpower. Entreri rescued Jarlaxle from his two lieutenants Kimmuriel Oblodra and Rai-guy and convinced him to come along with him to take the shard to Cadderly and find from him a way to destroy the dangerous artifact. Rai-guy eventually succeeded in capturing the shard, though his possession of it was short-lived.<ref name="SotS"/>
Crenshinibon was eventually destroyed by the red dragon Hephaestus when Jarlaxle tricked him into breathing fire on it (and its wielder, Rai-guy) whilst it was inside of a globe of magical darkness, the only known way to end the Crystal Shard's evil existence, as discovered by Cadderly.<ref name="SotS"/>
However, powerful necromantic energy still lingered around the shard. When the Spellplague began to affect Erlkazar and thus Hephaestus' lair, it turned the dragon into a dracolich and the nearby corpse of an illithid, Yharaskrik into a ghost who compelled Hephaestus to smash the shard into his forehead before fusing itself and the shard with the remains of Hephaestus' body. The three combined became a sentient conduit between the realm of the living and that of the dead. Yharaskrik's consciousness dubbed the trio the Ghost King.
Publication history
The Crystal Shard first appeared in R. A. Salvatore's book The Crystal Shard (the first novel in The Icewind Dale Trilogy) and later in the novels Passage to Dawn, The Silent Blade, and Servant of the Shard.
Other media
In the Black Isle computer game Icewind Dale, Crenshinibon was found by a demon named Belhifet who, in a feud with his rival Yxunomei, was banished to the Material Plane. He stumbled upon the shard and formed an army using its powers of suggestion. He erected Cryshal-Tirith in the town of Easthaven, until a wandering group of adventurers (who had also killed Yxunomei) sent him back to the Abyss.

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