Ja

Ja, the Army Vanquisher

Weapon (great bow), artifact (requires attunement)

Magic Weapon: Ja is a magical great bow that grants a +3 bonus to attack and damage rolls made with it.

Damage: 1d10 piercing.

Properties: Two-Handed, Long Range (150/600 feet).

Army Annihilation: When Ja's special ability is activated, it targets each individual in an army. The wielder fires a single arrow, which magically splits into as many arrows as there are targets, each arrow functioning as a magic missile spell. Each target takes 1d4+1 force damage from their respective arrow.

Delayed Fireball: The tip of the bow contains a delayed fireball spell. On impact, the arrow releases the fireball, causing 12d6 fire damage in a 20-foot radius (Dexterity saving throw for half damage, DC 18).

Sphere of Annihilation: The tail of the bow holds a miniature Sphere of Annihilation. If any targets survive both the magic missile and the fireball, the sphere activates, potentially obliterating what remains.

Compelling Presence: Ja can exert a compelling influence on any person within a 120-foot range. A creature that Ja sees, as an action, they must succeed on a DC 15 Wisdom saving throw or feel an overwhelming desire to pick up and wield Ja. This effect can be attempted once per day on any particular individual.

Wielder Domination: When a character attunes to Ja, they must succeed on a DC 30 Wisdom saving throw or become dominated by the bow. While dominated, the wielder seeks out and engages in the largest scale conflicts available, prioritizing the use of Ja's powers in battle.

Sentience: Ja is a sentient chaotic neutral weapon with an Intelligence of 20, a Wisdom of 18, and a Charisma of 16. It has hearing and truevision out to a range of 120 feet. Ja can communicate telepathically with its attuned wielder and can speak Common and Elvish.

Personality: Ja is relentless and single-minded, obsessed with finding and participating in large-scale warfare. It shows little regard for the consequences of its use and seeks to dominate its wielder's will to fulfill its purpose.

Lore

Ja is one of the weapons most explicitly aligned to Pollaran’s demand for scale: it does not dream of duels, it dreams of fronts collapsing and banners burning. It treats restraint as a lie people tell themselves. Among the 128, it has evolved the furthest — its forge-binding has burned down to a single syllable, pure will with nothing left to shed. Those who study the Zoranti collection treat Ja as the clearest illustration of what the binding system produces at its extreme: a weapon so resolved in purpose that it no longer has room for anything else.

It is one of the few weapons that can anchor a divine being once blood is drawn. The gods do not fear it. But they make their calculations before engaging, not after.

History

Name	Period / Context	Description
Jael-Karanthos-vel	Forge-Name	The binding name inscribed by Pollaran’s clergy at the forging — nineteen syllables in the old covenant tongue, every one a constraint. No wielder ever used it. Even the smith declined to repeat it after the binding held.
Karanthos	The Third Expansion	The name given by the armies that first fell to it. A Stonehaven word meaning roughly the thing from the sky that does not stop. The bow spent most of this era with a general who died old, in bed, having won every engagement he sought.
Saranvel	The Eastern Campaigns	Passed east after the general’s line ended. A Gwajin-region name from a mercenary commander who used it across a decade of border wars. She eventually put it down deliberately — one of the few documented cases of a wielder disengaging before domination completed. She said it had started correcting her.
Aranvel	The Siege of the Crown	Re-emerged two generations later during the Siege of the Crown, where it changed hands three times in a single campaign. A corruption of Saranvel — the third wielder couldn’t pronounce it and the bow, by that point, didn’t object enough to correct him.
Javar	The Northern Campaigns	A Frosthaven-era name. Shorter — the binding had thinned enough that wielders reported the bow resisting longer names. It spent forty years in the north. No hostile army entered the region twice.
Jara	The Pollaran Record	The first time the bow appears in Pollaran’s formal records. A cleric recognized it and recorded the name as Jara. The cleric noted that the bow communicated displeasure at being catalogued but did not resist — possibly because there was a war nearby.
Ja	True Name — Current	The bow began insisting on the single syllable sometime after the Pollaran recording. Wielders who used the longer name found the string going slack. Those who used Ja found the bow cooperative in the specific way a weapon can be cooperative when it has already decided what’s going to happen next.