At the end of the second age, the ainagûl was a man named Aurén Ilay. During his lifetime, the Dark Mage was waging a relentless war against the major nations of the land. Ilay took it upon himself to stop the Dark Mage, and so constructed ten magic items of incredible power. The first few of these were modified items that he had made previously, and so represented an element of chaos because they were not designed for the specific purpose as the others.

Once the ten were completed, Ilay awaited the opportunity to use them. His good friend, the elven king Tauláuren I, volunteered to fight the Dark Mage, and so when Ilay sensed that the Dark Mage was weakened after his battle with Gruumsh, he sent Tauláuren. Unfortunately, Tauláuren was helpless because the Dark Mage possessed the gem of Corellon. Ilay, in desperation, teleported in and imprisoned the Dark Mage with the Demon Dagger.

Ironically, this imprisonment saved the Dark Mage's life when, a few minutes later, Gruumsh sent an asteroid crashing into the castle, sinking the land in a sixty mile radius into the sea. A few months later, after the chaos had been brought under control by the gods, Corellon raised the Dark Mage's castle and retrieved the ten artifacts. Corellon, knowing the artifacts usefulness, distributed the ten to various deserving mortals after the holocaust.

Many centuries later, the wizard Sardul was chased out of his job as King's wizard in Backbone (another story), and built a castle on the ruins of one of Aurén Ilay's many castles. Here, he discovered some notes to the ten items. Sardul became obsessed with the artifacts and began using all of his power to learn their fate. Convinced they still existed, he enlisted the aid of the wizard Melchar, whose power was to see the past in an object¹⁾. Between the years 1031 and 1033, Melchar retrieved all ten missing items and assembled them at his castle.

Guided by a vision from Corellon, the elven king Lari Dahln led a small raiding party to recover the ten artifacts from Melchar. With powerful spells and skilled warriors, the king succeeded in killing Melchar and retrieving the ten. However, Melchar knew of the soul-absorbing powers of the ten and so donned them before he was killed. When the king's soldiers killed him, his soul became dormant inside the artifacts.

Lari Dahln, again led by a vision from Corellon, then instructed the ten most worthy of his soldiers to take the artifacts and conceal them. With the artifacts separated, Melchar was prevented from releasing himself and so was imprisoned within the ten.

The whole operation was never traced back to Sardul, and so the wizard was able to track down the ten warriors and curse them all to do his bidding, not Lari Dahln's. However, Sardul was afraid that he would be discovered by Edric's worldwatch spell, and so did not gather the ten together immediately. Corellon, though, felt that now was not the time for the ten to be recovered, and so erased Sardul's memory of the ten's locations and placed cryptic clues so that eventually they could be found again.

In the year 1090, Melchar's grand-daughter Elarion stumbled across the first clue, but was killed by the Good Party before she could follow up on the clue. The Good party then gathered the artifacts and gave them to Edric, who needed them to exorcize the soul of Sardul from his mind. After he was done with them, Edric devoted his energies to destroying the artifacts, reasoning that the chaos element was too unstable for safe use. At the time of his death, only the Gem of Zandra, the Tiara of Queen Zosia, and the Helm of Demarest survived.

Later, Pelham gathered these three in order to use their power to release Sardul and reshape him into a female – as a way of impressing and intimidating the council of wizards.

This blue-white diamond measures a full inch long and is about a half inch wide. It is imbedded in the palm of its wielder after a period of assimilation that is generally one week. Once in place, it cannot be removed unless a limited wish or better is used (or upon the character's death). It will not graft itself to a wielder who is not of the good alignment.

It glows with a dim, inward light that is barely enough to illuminate the wielder's palm (though it could be used to read a sheet of paper in the dark – slowly). The wielder is also given an aura of positive energy which will register strongly on a know alignment or a detect good spell (an increase in intensity, not of actual alignment). This aura gives the person a slight invulnerability to energy draining. For every level normally drained, the person may save vs. poison to avoid the loss (this is in addition to any other saves, etc.)

Further, the wielder may send forth a burst of positive energy once per day which, will disrupt undead unless they make a successful save vs. wands at -2. This may be directed at only one undead, however the blast will effectively turn all undead viewing it as if by a fourth level cleric.

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