That night, once again, Derivan cast [Starry Night]. They took a break on the side of the road for it, though they could have let the caravan keep running through the night; this was important to them, and they needed to use some crystals to refresh their connection to the system besides. So they gathered in a small circle, and Derivan allowed the magic of the skill to flow.

As always, he paid attention to the way the mana flowed.

Derivan had cast this spell a number of times, since the first time he had tested it back in the forest with Vex; each time, he told himself to pay attention to the mana, and each time he found that he couldn't quite keep his attention on it, like something was obscuring part of the process. Vex found he had the same problem. There was a point where the mana seemed to vanish, obfuscated by something that wasn't quite an infolock, or Shift.

This time, he looked at it with the new sense he had gained — with Patch — and he realized why.

[Starry Night] wasn't a spell. Maybe it had been, at one point — Derivan saw the way the mana flashed into shapes that looked remakably similar to glyphs, even while it was being absorbed by the system — but this was a system skill, and the mana was simply being pulled into the system, used to turn some metaphysical gears and call the effect of the skill into existence.

He wondered why. What made this a skill, and most other similar effects a spell?

The last of the mana finished running into the system. A few hundred points in total, something like a puddle's worth of that liquid energy; he felt something click in the gears of the system, and...

...something in the nearest reality anchor responded. The one Misa was holding on to, that was being held inside her interface, somehow.

Once more, those balls of fire manifested in the sky, this time smaller and brighter than before. Once more, a cool mist flooded out among the stars in striated shades of blue, creating what looked just for a moment like a living painting. Gently, he pulled on those mechanisms in the skill, watching with Patch as the reality anchor responded, and the stars shrank and multiplied accordingly, until it was as close as he remembered to how the Serpent of the Night Sky had looked.

That, presumably, was what the night sky had looked like. They still didn't know when it had vanished; only that it had most likely been recent.

"Looking at it always makes me feel a little sad," Vex said into the silence, staring up at the sky.

"Because we know it's supposed to mean something to us," Sev said quietly. "But it doesn't."

"We'll give it new meaning." Misa folded her arms. "It's what we've always done, right? We're the ones giving meaning to things anyway. So if some shit takes it away, we'll invent something new, and we'll hold it even closer than before. See if these fucks can take it away then."

"Misa." Sev chuckled a bit, the word more affectionate than anything else. Derivan noticed, though, that there was something about the cleric that was just a little bit tense — the topic had touched on something personal for him. "Not everything is a fight, you know."

"I think they made it one when they took the stars away from us," Misa said with a shrug. "I'm not an expert on sentimentality, but the sky is one of the things that stays mostly the same no matter where you are. If I had to guess, they were one of the things different cultures had in common; something related to the stars. I bet there were skills and classes centered around them, even."

"We know there are skills centered around them," Derivan said, even as [Starry Night] slowly faded from his control. "And that means there were classes. I wonder what happened to them."

"Knowing the system? Nothing good," Misa said with a sigh. She picked out the four mana crystals she'd brought out from the caravan, tossing one to each of them. "Time to use the crystals?"

"I will keep an eye on what they do," Derivan said, because he thought perhaps he could observe something about how this usage of the crystals functioned. A tap on the system's interface brought up the appropriate window.

Fill this week's mana crystal quota? Your System link will degrade if you do not.

/1 crystals required

ACCEPT