The cold numbness which had washed over her now grew into the feeling of absolute cold, a thin jet of blue-white Gelum Fog escaping the Philosopher’s Eye, progressively growing larger and more intense.

She channeled Gelum directly into Tempesta’s action as she loaded its tube and placed the loading tube back in its place within the cylinder, attempting to delude herself into thinking that the gut-wrenching tightness in her chest was just an excess of the essentia of ice, that she had simply channeled too much of it due to not being acclimated to the Fog output magnifying properties of her mask.

“It’s a Gelum imbalance, just equalize it and it’ll be fine…” she lied to herself as she raised up her gun, attempting to channel an ice-aspected Essence Shot in the hopes of perhaps immobilizing the stonebound general. She tried, and tried, and it wouldn’t obey, even after she forcibly closed her left eye to drown out what it saw. Inevitably, something broke, and with it, so did her choice to ignore what she felt. Zefaris allowed her left eye to open again, letting out a shaky sigh as she lowered her gun. A single tear ran down her cheek, freezing solid before it even reached the top of her mask.

“I’ve walked side by side with you for as long as I can remember, my good friend. Now, if you would… Let me share the stillness of your embrace.”

All sensation was lost to her, and the stillness of death itself consumed her being.

Her right eye rolled back into her head as she slumped over backwards, gazing skyward, a geyser of Fog in pale-blue and bone-white erupting from it, gradually increasing in size before it could no longer be contained. A torrent of light in these self-same colours thereafter erupted from the implant, both the eye and her body moving in concert as a circle enveloping the entirety of the battlefield was drawn upon the clouds in an instant, and its interior then filled with glyphwork so complex that even at this scale much of it was illegible. Even so, a few of those on the ground knew what those glyphs meant and had the time to read them before the glyphic circle could take effect, as their immense complexity took time to render even with the impossible drawing speed of the entranced markswoman’s eye.

Bherad, Collier, even Crovacus all knew what this meant, and they rejoiced at the occasion, whereas Ubul… Panicked. Genuinely, truly, panicked. He knew not what to do, aware that at the rate the seal was being drawn and his distance from the beam’s origin, he could neither move himself nor throw something quickly enough to prevent its completion.

The Living Storm’s clouds, though incredibly rich in Fulgur and Aqua, were also a nigh-bottomless wellspring of Gelum, the second of the aforementioned essentia swiftly being transmuted into the latter with the impending arrival of fall, and with it, Ikesia’s early snows.

It was orders of magnitude beyond what was necessary to fuel this grand seal. As if out of nowhere, there came a sudden, torrential downfall, the huge flakes slowing as they neared the ground, only to stop mid-air… Along with everything else inside Ubul’s wall, and for nearly a hundred meters more outside it.

BELLADONNA SIGN

THE STILLNESS OF DEATH UNTO ALL THINGS

HEADPIERCER ARTS: ETERNAL SNOW

When feeling returned to her at last, the only thing Zefaris could feel was that newly familiar reassuring cold. Everything was still, the world at peace in utter cold and silence. She made the mental connection instantly - the stillness of death, shared with everything in the vicinity. This absolute stillness, this false cessation of the world itself through the cold of death, it scarcely needed to be cemented as a technique - the gnosis of it was already there, she had merely let it out.

The very idea of her having seemingly brought the battlefield to a standstill was so far beyond reality that it overshot any possibility of surprise and landed right in the realm of resigned acceptance, its mechanics extrapolated from the basic understanding she had of gelumancy and the concept of “Stillness” derived from “Calm Death”. Indeed, the battlefield was as calm as a crypt, but for how long?

The Great Seal of Cessation loomed overhead, its complex glyphwork vanishing bit by bit, counting down counterclockwise. If it were accurate, she had maybe fifteen, twenty seconds at most. The cold reality of it was, she couldn’t reach Zelsys even if she were to spend this time window exclusively on trying to get there… But it was more than enough time to enact the single goal her mind dwelt on - fully and thoroughly sharing the cold cessation of death with Ubul.

Yes, this cold, she would share it thoroughly, every last bit of it. Every last iota of the tremendous blue-white geyser that still gushed from her left eye, denoting the tremendous amount of essentia contained within it, the implant pulsing with such utter numbness that even it somehow became an ache. Even thinking about it made it intensify to a wrenching pain, the sort felt when one drank ice-cold water too quickly.

“Now, let me share your stillness with him, every last bit of it, that it might persist even when this frozen moment passes.”

She directed an output of Gelum through the Philosopher’s Eye and into Tempesta’s action, suffusing the firearm until the brass-plated exterior froze over and the belladonna ornament upon its stock took on a bluish-white glow. With all that remained, she carved a seal into the air in front of Tempesta’s muzzle, invoking every bit of knowledge on glyphs she had gained, combining it with the tremendous processing power of the Philosopher’s Eye to create a complex circular seal.

It would allow the gelum to form into a solid projectile, while also drawing in ambient Gelum leftover from her casting of the Grand Seal to further fuel the technique, for no magic was perfectly efficient with no side products or waste.