Freezing Gauntlets (Patreon)

Wondrous item, very rare (requires attunement)

When not worn, these gauntlets appear to be simple iron cuffs. Once worn, however, creeping plates of crystalline ice form from beneath the metal to encase your arms and hands in icy gauntlets. While wearing the gauntlets, you have resistance to cold damage, and any target you hit with them as part of an unarmed strike takes an extra 1d4 cold damage. Alternatively, frost creeps up the metal of any weapon you're holding. If you hit a target with a metal weapon, that target also takes an extra 1d4 cold damage from the attack.

Cone of Cold. While wearing the gauntlets, you can use an action to hold your hands out and cast the cone of cold spell from them (save DC 16). Whenever you cast the spell in this way, there is a cumulative 25 percent chance that this version of the spell permanently changes. When it does, the version of cone of cold cast by the gauntlets deals half as much damage, the size of its cone is halved, and once it's cast from the gauntlets, it can't be cast from them again until the next dawn.

Others speak of the icy grip of death, a simple metaphor to comprehend that grim inevitability.

Yet these cuffs make me both agent and prisoner to that simple phrase, at once manacles and marks of power. For as long as I have borne them I have suffered no cold, yet too have I felt no warmth other than the fleeting shreds I tear from others.

And so death do I feel, and death do I become as even my veins bleed forth only frost.