We kept talking with Hati until deep into the night, though many of the topics were trivial, and he and Riala spent a considerable amount of time talking about everyday life in and outside the walls. At least until I asked her to go home when the bells rang thirteen o’clock, the equivalent of half past seven on earth, since we had told Zara that she would come home for dinner. Begrudgingly, she had petted Hati one last time for the evening and then left.

At that time, I also realized that Tomar had not returned yet, but we got a message from him not long after, saying that he would stay at his house tonight. Apparently he wanted to keep Aelene company for a little bit, since she was still under the weather, now that the adrenaline had subsided.

That left Berla, Lilana, Hati, and me, though Lilana and I eventually switched, so she could get some shut-eye, and Berla fell asleep at my side during a less exciting part of our conversation with Hati. The wolf was the last to succumb to his tiredness, somewhere around midnight, and for the first time in a while, I had the night to myself.

Not counting the failed experiment with Oryn earlier in the day, I hadn’t really done a lot of research over the past weeks due to my various new commitments, and when I realized that I was the only one left awake, I got a little excited. After all, what else was there to do in the middle of the night, as everyone else was fast asleep? Well, almost everyone.

“Thank you,” I whispered to Garn after he handed me a bowl of blue stones I had asked him to get for me. After closing the door, I sat down at the desk, to get to work.

While we were perfectly capable of using scripts without stones, it required a lot of concentration every single time, and when you wanted to experiment, using stones was just easier.

Quill in hand, I started writing scripts on my arm that wouldn’t have made sense to either Tomar or Riala, as I tested entirely new descriptors and variables, trying to find things we didn’t know about yet. The last time I had done this in any serious manner was all the way back during our first night out in the Wildlands, in the woods south of Alarna. Back then I had figured out how to link multiple scripts together and how to delay effects, with both of these things proving very useful. However, I believed even these applications to be just scratching the surface. After thinking about mages and healers again earlier, a fire had been ignited in me, and I was determined to find something new.

Tomar had always thought it unfortunate that there weren’t more divine instruments, because even after we gained access to the ritual platforms, we just didn’t have a lot of research material. Personally, I wasn’t as bothered by it though. It would always be easier to study an existing script of course, instead of trying to find new things by luck and power of will. However, brute forcing this issue had its own appeal, even if it wasn’t Tomar’s cup of tea.

A key sticking point for me from the beginning had been the source of the mana. The water source script defined it as “ITL,” which I guessed stood for “internal.” This made a lot of sense, because we could say with a reasonable amount of certainty that that’s where the mana was coming from. The inside of the vessel. However, if the source had to be defined explicitly, it indicated that there could be other sources. The question was how to go about defining another one.

I started by replacing “ITL” with various potential abbreviations for “external,” but not one of these scripts did anything. This indicated that there was no pre-defined external source, where the script could just pull the mana from the air or something.

Next, I tried to define my own external sources, by defining a point in 3D space that would still pull the mana from Lilana’s body, but not as the internal source. If this was possible, it would allow one to sciphon someone else’s mana, and while the script would be difficult to use, it could be incredibly powerful. Unfortunately, this did not yield any results either. The script did execute, but nothing happened, meaning that there weren’t any errors in it, but that it couldn’t lock onto my self-defined mana source.

I kept testing various combinations for a while, I tried locking onto mana that was streaming out of my body, and I even tried to lock onto Hati’s mana, in case the external source had to be different from the internal one, but I just didn’t have any luck. Still, I was certain I was on the right track, because it was possible to define another source. So I kept trying everything I could think of.

At least an hour had passed when I was finally ready to give up on this idea for the moment, and try something else instead. However, before I did so, I thought about the one other predefined location we had ever seen in a script. The script Gallas had used to remove me from Tomar’s body had defined my target location as “ORLMPROC.” I couldn’t be sure what it stood for, but it was something I could try. Should I though?

This location was part of a script written by a god. Gallas presumably wouldn’t be happy if he were to get an alert about this and then found me in someone else’s body again. I didn’t think that there was a very high chance for this, however. So far, he had appeared when very specific things happened, like someone receiving a second Calling or an unknown Calling. He was the god of rituals after all, and he simply made sure that that process functioned as intended. Me potentially pulling mana from somewhere else via a modified water source script shouldn’t affect his operation in any way, so I believed it should be fine. There was some risk remaining, but that would almost always be the case, and we had to be willing to take it. Otherwise, we would very soon get stuck with our research.

After careful consideration, I decided to take the step and finished the script. A little nervous, I picked up a blue stone, and after taking a deep breath, I placed it on my arm. As I did so, I had exactly three possible results in mind. One, the script might simply do nothing, because that location couldn’t be used to supply mana. Two, water might start to appear, but the mana would not be coming from me, making the experiment a success. Three, a god might come down and reptriment me for doing something forbidden, and maybe they would remove me once more. For a brief moment, I glanced at Berla, sleeping on the sofa, as the stone touched my skin. Regret bubbled up inside me, thinking that I might have made a mistake, but nothing could’ve prepared me for the actual effect my script ended up having.

I was holding my arm out in front of me, with my palm facing downwards above a bowl. Instead of nothing, water, or gods, something else appeared though. Something I hadn’t seen in a while, and most certainly not as the result of using a blue stone. Flakes of shifting light started raining down from my hand and passed through the desk below my palm, as if they weren’t incorporeal. I stared at the display in awe, as the flakes kept coming, for far longer than this script should’ve run under normal circumstances.

This effect was exactly the same as back then, when we had tested the black stone we found in the woods. We had broken it into smaller pieces, to not use all of it at once, but after four tries we stopped the experiments for the moment. We had absolutely no idea what we were dealing with, and just letting these flakes rain down on the ground again and again wasn’t getting us anywhere, so there was no reason to use up the remaining pieces. We had also been close to Cerus at that time, and we hoped to maybe find more black stones there. Unfortunately we ended up with more pressing matters than figuring out what black stones did, and we didn’t get any more in the end. I hadn’t actually seen any on the market anyway though, so they might have been very rare.

I started to carefully move my hand around and examined the effect on the flakes. They didn’t behave like water, but more like feathers, swaying back and forth as they fell and changed colors. It looked kind of like a kaleidoscope at times. They passed through the desk and then kept falling, but before they reached the floor, they started fading away. This we hadn’t observed in the woods yet. I tried holding sheets of paper below my hand, but the flakes didn’t seem to react to them, until I used an entire book, at which point they started fading away earlier. They react to matter in some way...

Just like the tree branch that Tomar had held below the flakes back then though, neither the desk nor the papers or the book showed any reaction. They looked perfectly normal. I didn’t dare put Lilana’s hand under it, however. Even if the flakes didn’t do anything to dead wood, who knew what they might do to a human.

Something wasn’t quite right here though. The script I had used included a conversion, which should turn the mana into something else, and that something else was supposed to be defined by the stone that was used. In this case, it had been a blue stone, which should’ve produced water, no matter where the mana came from. What exactly was “ORLMPROC,” and how was it related to the black stone effect?

When the flakes finally stopped raining from my hand, my eyes fell on two other lights, shining slightly in the dark room.

“What was that...” Hati asked, looking straight at me from where he was lying on the carpet.

“Oh... I thought you were asleep...” I whispered.

“I helled something weird,” he said.

“Are we really going with ‘helling?’ For ‘hear-smelling?’ We shouldn’t let a seven year old make up names...” I said. “Whatever. What was it like?”

“It... was like... nothing. But also...” he started.

“... everything...” I finished.

“Yes! Can you feel it after all?”

“Not really... Not like you can at the very least. But those were the exact words I said to Tomar and the others when we first saw these flakes. It was just a weird feeling I had.”

“What are they?” he asked again.

“I don’t know. We weren’t able to research them any more back then. I guess they might as well be ‘everything,’ or ‘anything.’”

It was very curious that Hati and I apparently had the same feeling towards these flakes. Especially since I didn’t think that I had “helled” them. It was just... a feeling. With no rhyme or reason.

“I’ve never seen anything like that before...” Hati said. “You guys are so weird. And you do so many weird things.”

“Well, I can hardly argue against this specific experiment being weird,” I said with a chuckle.

“Boys...” came a quiet, slightly annoyed sounding voice from the couch. “Sleep...” Berla said as she turned around, without looking at anyone.

She didn’t sleep a lot, and generally it wasn’t very important to her either, but when she did lie down, she could get really cranky if you woke her up. She was very much like myself in that regard.

“Sorry,” I whispered with an apologetic smile.

After essentially staying up for almost two entire days, she needed her sleep, and I wouldn’t want to disturb her.

“Let’s talk in the morning,” I said to Hati, who nodded and lied down again as well.

Don’t mind me... I thought, as I got back to tweaking my script some more.