Maintaining eye contact with her right eye, she squinted and looked down at the coins with her left eye, once more a thin, rapidly-moving trail of Fog whipping from it and sweeping across the coins in a motion. She proceeded to take a breath and toss them up into the air, staring upward while Fog once more poured from her left eye into Tempesta’s action.

Click. Boom.

All five wooden coins exploded at once, Zefaris having manipulated the shot into forming the correct pattern by the time they hit.

“It can’t shoot lightning bolts, but it can magnetize the shot to make all sorts of shapes,” Zef beamed proudly, raising Tempesta onto her shoulders and hanging her hands off it.

“I’d ask how you do the math that quickly, but I’m not exactly in a position to pose that question.”

“It’s the Philosopher’s Eye, I think. I can still do that,” she replied, gesturing to the few splinters that had rained down, “with just my right eye open, but it’s much harder, takes much more setup. I’ve been working on some other things, but they’re not quite there - pausing fired bullets so I can set up salvos, projecting kinetic mirrors outright without coins, basic ice magic, things like that.”

Out of those three, one seemingly innocuous thing stood out to Zelsys: “Ice magic? Where’d you get Gelum from?”

“Yeah, that’s… The thing I’m trying to figure out as well. Jorfr’s been helping me figure it out, but it’ll be harder for me to grasp it than for a Borean like him. Since we’re tangentially descended from the same Hyperborean ancestors as the Boreans, us Ikesians tend to have an affinity for Gelum, albeit much weaker than our northern cousins. My affinity is slightly above average by Jorfr’s reckoning, but still far too weak for any notable Gelumancy - which is… Where my relationship with death comes in. I have no clue how, but I found this little book about the different forms of death and their elemental connotations…”

She folded Tempesta in half, holstered it, and pulled a conspicuously pristine, modern-looking booklet out of her pocket, its cover black leather. Its pages turned out to be covered in beautiful, hand-written ancient script, mixed with symbols strikingly similar to those writ within the Ivory Scroll, and just as those, Zelsys could infer their meanings without being able to read the foreign script they were attached to. It detailed the different kinds and stages of death, and the one which Zef had opened the booklet to was one that Zelsys, too, was familiar with. It was the calm, cold death of a skeleton in a ditch, an ancient crypt, a long-gone-quiet battlefield.

“...and this one fit. I checked my traits when I had borrowed your Tablet, and lo and behold, the trait was just sitting there, and I hadn’t realized because I hadn’t thought to check my damned traits. As it turns out, the trait I’d gotten from my dungeon trial had advanced, and it now strengthens my affinity for Gelum.”

The rising frustration in her voice only elicited amusement from Zelsys.

“Guess we should get you your own Tablet, then,” she chuckled.

__________________________________________________________________________________

Crovacus Estoras felt cautiously optimistic. The Ubul situation was possibly the best imaginable political excuse to transition Willowdale’s militia into a full-blown armed force, and despite some hiccups, the mobilization was going well considering the hurried timescale.

By the accounts of the Krishorns’ own astronomers, the Blue Moon Event would occur on Wednesday of the upcoming week, leaving a decent time window to ready the Tidebreaker Force as well as transport the Elimination Force to Ubul’s Tomb proper.

Tuesday began, and he woke at four in the morning to a missive from Zelsys on his desk, this time with rather good news from Kanbu: “The stones will walk again.”

And walk, they did, as the enigmatic eatery owner made his way around townfrom the wee hours of the morning in the guise of a robed figure with an eerily realistic dragon’s head mask, bearing a basketful of talismans that looked straight from the Anti-feudalist Rebellion Era, affixing them to one statue after another, repeating in a distorted voice, “The time to fulfill thine duty hath come. Rise and defend thine creators, Idola Custos!”

Slowly, Willowdale’s statues formed a phalanx with Kanbu at its spearhead, and yet…

There was no panic.

Willowdale’s people were not afraid or taken aback by the display, but either overjoyed or amused that what many had thought to be a mere folk tale was entirely true, while a great many among the older population acted more like this was a long-overdue inevitability. Even most of those who were not aware - foreign minorities, recent arrivals, or those who happened to not know - were kept calm by the reactions of their fellows, or were just not unnerved at all by the display.

The Guardian Idols lined up in the fields outside the northern wall, in the space now freed up by departed peddlers, facing Ubul’s Tomb as if they already knew. At first, a few dozen, but the Dragon-headed Man was not yet done, for he approached the governor and questioned:

“Where are the others stored?”

Knowing not himself, the governor asked the senator whose charge it was to manage the preservation and maintenance of Willowdale’s cultural icons, who - enamored with the fulfillment of a folk myth - eagerly led Kanbu to a store room which held over a hundred statues that had been sitting here since the city had first suffered from the war’s ravages and in the process lost one of its most iconic statues. Its pieces, too, were stored here, from its pedestal to every single remnant of its ten-meter body, and it was this broken thing that Kanbu focused on first.

“O Guardian of the Wall, thou shalt walk again - let my voice guide you!”

And, though in pieces, the ten-meter statue somehow pulled itself back together into a coherent mass, green flame enveloping it and shining from the cracks as it got up and walked out of the warehouse to join its compatriots in the phalanx. Its weapon, however, was truly lost, for the great mass of cold-iron had been smelted down years prior at the Sage’s orders, and, though Kanbu had no way of knowing this, its mass made up a portion of Zero’s inner frame.