Silver Key

The Silver Key is an ancient magical artifact in the fiction of H. P. Lovecraft that unlocks gates of space and time and allows access to remote times and places of the universe. It was last in the possession of Randolph Carter, who used it to travel through the Ultimate Gate. 
In Lovecraft's short story "The Silver Key", it is described as "a huge key of tarnished silver covered with cryptical arabesques". Carter has a vision of his late grandfather, who tells him where to find the key: It's in a box in the attic of his Boston home, where it was placed by Edmund Carter, his ancestor who lived at the time of the Witch Trials. The key had been handed down to Edmund by ancestors further back: Randolph's grandfather mentions Sir Randolph Carter, an Elizabethan wizard, and another ancestor who lived at the time of the Crusades and learned secrets from the Saracens who held him captive. Randolph Carter eventually uses the Silver Key to go back in time, reverting from his adult self in 1928 to his child self in 1883.
To use the key, it must be held up to the setting sun and turned nine times, with some particular "syllables of ceremony" intoned on the ninth turn, at a location near a "dark polarity and induced gate". The Silver Key was created in prehistoric Hyperborea, and is attuned to "the personal consciousness-angles of human beings alone". When Carter found his consciousness transported to the body of Zkauba (an insectoid Yaddithian from millions of years in the past), he found that the Silver Key might assist him in travelling back to his own time, but would not have the power to return him to his original body. To do so, Carter would need a powerful spell that might give the key "limitless powers it otherwise lacked". (: "Through the Gates of the Silver Key")
Category:Mystical Artefacts
Category:Artefacts Originating From Lovecraft Circle Works