Session 59.5 - Seal of Disapproval

“Okay. Sealing a Guardian Force.” Perilune wrings her hands together in her lap, sitting across Linnet’s cabin from the Starfall’s Morale Officer. “The first thing to know is that Guardian Forces each command exponentially more power than you, or I, ever could. It is absolutely an inhuman amount of power. Unfettered, a Guardian Force can tear through multiple people — armies, even, in the case of the most powerful. That power is too dangerous to allow unchecked. There is a skill some of the Lumin have learned that allows us to seal a Guardian Force.”
She clasps her hands together, fingers interlaced. “When a Guardian Force manifests in full, it can extend its own power out to anything around it, claiming dominion over it and using it as an extension of its own will. Animals, archaeology, even people. We call this tempering, and it’s irreversible.”
Linnet stiffens, and then leans forward, undoing the bottom of her braid to redo it, something to do with her hands. “Extension of its own will?” she repeats back to Perilune. “What, like… enslaving them?”
Perilune nods. “Some of the Guardian Forces use this strategically. Some don’t. Some people are immune. The stronger your crystal is, the harder it is to be tempered. The Lumin are all immune, too,” she adds, almost as an afterthought. “Well that’s blowing convenient,” Linnet grumbles. “How does this factor into the sealing?”
“That has to be happening,” Perilune says. “The Guardian Force has to be using its manifestation in full.” She straightens her fingers with her hands still clasped together. “Once they have manifested, I can take the energy they’re outputting—” here she waggles her fingertips, “—and shape it into a seal around them, so any energy they send out just reinforces the seal around them.” Perilune slides her hands apart until just her fingertips are touching, forming a circle around the air between her palms.
“And then?” Linnet asks.
Perilune slowly relaces her fingertips, then shifts so her left hand forms a fist, and her right hand closes around it. “We push the edges of the seal in, until it holds the Guardian Force,” she says. “Guardian Forces are a little like a liquid, in one specific way; their energy will let them take the form of whatever vessel they are in. It’s why they could be the Great Crystal.” She moves her right hand away, leaving just her left hand, slender fingers balled in a tight fist. “Once they are sealed, they can’t hurt anyone anymore.”
“And then they’re a mask,” Linnet says.
“They will be,” Perilune says. “They first become a crystal, one we call magicite, and then they shift back into their mask form shortly thereafter.”
“Did you seal Midgardsormr?”
“No,” Perilune says. She relaxes her hands. “Midgardsormr shifted back into his mask after expending all of his energy in the battle against us, where you all fought to keep me safe. That wasn’t a sealing. Sealing looks a lot different.”
“But it’s good?”
“Oh yes.” Perilune gives Linnet her most reassuring smile. “If they weren’t sealed, they could do so much damage and hurt so many people. You’ve seen what they can do. If they won’t listen to reason, this protects us from them, and them from them.”

“Tempering,” Isa says.
Apocynthion knows when to hit his mark. “I’ve only seen it the one time, with Syldra,” he says. “She’s — she was — a sea dragon, and manifested a storm strong enough to wreck a whole fleet of ships. Lightning bolts, tidal waves, water tornadoes which have a name, I just don’t know what it is, all of that.”
Bast nods casually, though whether it’s to indicate he knows what Apoc means, or that he knows the word Apoc is looking for and has no interest in sharing it with him, is unclear.
“We were about two hundred miles inland, give or take,” Apoc says.
Bast and Isa exchange a glance. “That’s tempering?”
“Small lake there now,” Apoc says. “Fortunately, there weren’t any other people around. Apparently they can temper people, too, though I don’t know how.”
“We’ll need countermeasures,” Isa, ever the pragmatist, says to Bast.
The Captain nods his agreement. “Perilune was trying to seal Syldra, she said?”
“Yeah.” Apoc’s voice is hollow. “Compressing her into this twisted shape, outright snuffing her light, that’s not ‘sealing,’ that’s just torture. I’ve never heard such agony. I’ll never hear it again if I can do anything about it. She can mark me a villain in her eyes all she wants.”
Isa shifts her focus to the distance for a moment, the slightest shift in her expression that the officers have come to identify as the countdown to defenestration.
“Thank you, Apoc,” Bast says.
Apoc gives the slightest bow from his chair.