Scales of Obedience

The Scales of Obedience take the shape of a golden balance. A pair of bowl-like pans, each rounded into a half-sphere, hang from the beam on four cords apiece, while the handle joins a heart-shaped flourish set just above the pivot. Whenever the device is brought to life alongside Auserlese, it shines with a white light.

The demon Aura the Guillotine, who had endured for more than five centuries, leaned on the scales to bend others to her will through her signature Spell of Obedience, Auserlese. The magic sets her own soul against her target's across the two pans and measures their mana; whoever proves the lighter is bound to serve the other without end, reduced to a puppet whose body answers her commands whether it lives or dies, until it crumbles to dust. So vast was Aura's mana that across five hundred years she was said never to have weighed a soul heavier than her own. The method carried a single flaw: a target of strong enough will could throw off the spell for a brief while, and to guard against that Aura took to beheading everyone she enslaved.

Aura is the scales' lone wielder, turning them on knights and soldiers throughout her long reign. Their undoing arrives when Frieren faces her: the balance first leans toward Aura, who declares the win and moves to take her foe's head, only for Frieren to loose the mana she had kept hidden for a thousand years. The pans lurch hard in Frieren's favor, the spell rebounds, and Aura, now the one forced to obey, is made to turn the blade upon herself.