Chapter 58: Night

A dark, glittering fog coalesced in the middle of the clearing.

Derivan heard Vex breathe in, a sharp intake of air — the lizardkin's eyes were wide with wonder, and Derivan couldn't blame him. The fog was a deep, dark shade of blue, verging on being the same shade as the night sky itself; it might very well have been, if not for the fact that it was fog, and so didn't do quite that good a job filtering out all that ambient light.

Perhaps rather conveniently, though, a cloud passed in front of the sun — and with that bit of extra shade, the spell suddenly turned stronger. The fog thickened, spilling into the outer layers of the clearing and slowly beginning to spread; struck by the thought that the skill might have a larger range than he'd intended, Derivan quickly turned to Vex.

"Can you [Delineate] a space for it?" he said. His words were oddly quiet, like part of him was worried that speaking loudly would break the transient beauty that was forming in front of them. Vex seemed to feel the same way, because he didn't respond verbally; instead he nodded and gestured, and a shimmering barrier seemed to form around the edges of the clearing.

Just replicating what seemed to be the very essence of the night would be one thing — something about this was deeply reminiscent of the Serpent of the Night Sky, and for good reason — but within the spell were what seemed like full fireball spells. Balls of flame the size of Vex's head swirled in abstract spirals, the light they emitted shining briefly before being once more subsumed by the fog. Each one grew and shrank with every passing moment, the movement unpredictable.

"It's beautiful," Vex said softly after a moment. The lizardkin still hadn't looked away from it, but he seemed to be trying to pull himself together. "Um— is it a damaging spell, do you think? Do you have much control over it?"

"I have some," Derivan said, his own reply quiet. He could feel them now, like knobs that he'd been given control over. The problem was that the knobs were unlabelled, and he didn't know what each of them did.

So he turned them carefully, and slowly.

As he turned one of them, the color of the fireballs seemed to shift — from a gleaming yellow to a deeper orange, and then to the dark red of firewood. In the other direction, it shifted from yellows to the green of Vex's scales, then to the blue of the sky, then all the way down into the purples and pinks that he'd rarely ever seen outside of portraits and paintings. And his own armor, as far as purples went.

Vex breathed out slowly, and stepped in closer towards the boundary of the spell — Derivan reached out to pull him back, just in case. Vex didn't resist, at least, so presumably it wasn't a hypnotic sort of spell, not that he was sure something like that existed. Vex just leaned into him, instead, staring at the shifting lights.

Derivan reached for the next knob.

This one seemed to change the size of the fireballs — they grew larger as he turned this one, though at the same time, he could feel another mental knob moving on its own. The more he turned this one, the more the fireball in the center grew and the more the other one twisted backwards; he saw, at the same time, that the fireballs were growing fewer in number. At its largest setting, there almost seemed to be a blazing sun sitting in the middle of the night sky, though 'sun' didn't quite fit as a word to describe what it was.

It didn't hurt to stare at, for one thing. It wasn't quite a single ball of flame, for the other. The odd nature of the light was far clearer when it was so large; it moved slowly, like strips of paint crawling over a painter's canvas.

He reached for the one that had moved on its own next — and sure enough, this one seemed to multiply the number of fireballs, though their individual sizes shrank. The fourth knob made them zip around inside the fog like fireflies, leaving glittering trails wherever they went.

"That is all I can change, I think," Derivan said, and Vex nodded. He hesitated slightly, as if reluctant to call on Derivan to end the spell.

"...We should test if this spell damages things," Vex eventually said. "Maybe drop the spell for now?"

Derivan glanced at Vex and chuckled. "If you wish to watch it for a while," he said. "We can do that instead."

Vex didn't reply for a moment — but then he nodded, maybe a little shyly. "I see mana act on its own a lot," he confided after a moment. "But I never see it act like this. Spells are always function over form, so you rarely see spells focusing on the aesthetic of it all... there are a few magi that try to focus on it. But the system isn't very good at art."

"It appears to leave that in the hands of its users," Derivan offered. "I have seen your sketches. You are quite good at that yourself."

Vex colored. "I had to learn how to draw diagrams," he said by way of explanation.

"You learned it well, then," Derivan chuckled. "I only wish you would share your sketches more, and with the rest of the team."

"I... maybe." Vex looked down for a moment, then back to the spell. He took a few minutes to take it in, like he was trying to memorize it for later — Derivan adjusted the colors back to the original shades of yellow for him, and watched as the shifting shades of yellow and blue bounced off his scales.

They spent a moment more watching the spell, and then Vex nodded to himself. "Let's test it," he said. "See if the skill does any damage. Can you cancel it?"

"Yes," Derivan said. In his mind, it felt more like a switch he had to press — and as soon as he did, the fog collapsed, dissipating into nothing along with the fireballs it contained. Vex dismissed the [Delineate] boundary a moment after the spell vanished, then watched the clearing with slightly narrowed eyes.

"There's frost and burns on the grass," he said softly. "I think it's safe to say that spell does damage. Fire and ice elemental damage, it looks like?"

"We do not know how much, though," Derivan pointed out.

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"It's hard to get exact damage numbers anyway, unless we're sparring," Vex said with a slight wince. "Or if we find some monsters with known health values... there aren't really any monsters here, and it's dangerous to spar directly without Sev around."

"I was not going to suggest sparring, regardless," Derivan said with a chuckle. "Perhaps we can focus on your spells now?"

"Your skill gave me some ideas," Vex said thoughtfully. "Fire and ice together, too... That's not a normal presentation of a spell. It's rare for opposing elements to work together like that. Did it draw any mana from you, or is it more of a system skill?"

Derivan blinked, the lights in his helmet flickering, and checked his status. "...It drew some mana from me," he said, surprised. "A few hundred. I did not notice."

"You didn't feel the mana moving?" Vex asked, surprised. "I mean, that doesn't mean it's definitively a spell and not a skill, but all spells use mana..."

"I did not feel my mana move, no." Derivan paused for a moment, contemplating his status screen. "A side effect of the skill description being errored out, perhaps?"

"I'd still expect you to be able to sense it using your version of [Mana Manipulation]," Vex said with a frown. "But I think this is fine. You'll just need to keep an eye on your mana if you're casting that spell."

Derivan nodded. "I will also make a deliberate attempt to feel how my mana is moving, I think," he said. "I did not think to do so before."

Vex grinned at him. "S'why I'm here," he said cheerfully. "To help with magic! But also I wanna try to do some magic now, so..."

He paused with consideration, and began using a combination of [Splash of Mana] and [Delineate]. He was careful with how he did it, too, and with his color choices — each use of [Delineate] marked out a region in the frostburned grass, and each shade of color he used for [Splash of Mana] came out identical to one of the shades they'd seen just before, when Derivan had used [###### Night].

The end result was... less than perfect. [Delineate] was a poor substitute for using an actual paintbrush, and it showed; perhaps with more practice, Vex would be able to imitate the product more closely. Derivan was still impressed, however, and Vex still seemed happy with the end result.

"Is that fire magic?" Derivan asked curiously, gesturing to an impression of the ball of fire.

"It isn't," Vex said, shaking his head. "I want to see if mana aspect matters, and [Splash of Mana] lets me tune the color of mana, which... it really shouldn't be able to do. That's not how mana works. But the system breaks the rules all the time, anyway." He pondered his painting for a moment, fidgeting with the dagger in his hand. "I'm not sure if anything is supposed to happen... I'm going to give it a moment. Maybe when it dries?"

"Or the different mana aspects are required," Derivan supplied. Nothing happened, still, even as the paint began to dry, and Derivan saw Vex begin to sag; the lizardkin had been hoping something would happen.

An idea struck him.

"Perhaps if we do what I did with [Barrier], earlier," Derivan said softly. "I used [Mana Manipulation] to ask the ambient mana to fuel the skill, rather than fueling it with my own mana. But I did not force the mana into doing as I wished — merely guided it."

Vex frowned slightly, but he seemed willing to try anything. He reached out with his own version of [Mana Manipulation] and began to try to guide the ambient mana — but his version was too strong, and Derivan could almost feel the ambient mana shying away from his grip. Without thinking about it, he knelt by Vex, a hand on the lizardkin's shoulder, and reached out with his own version of the skill.

"Like this," he said. Vex's eyes widened, though he didn't say anything. Derivan guided him slowly — not grabbing the mana and moving it, but guiding it, pushing it towards the painting on the grass.

Derivan's skill with [Mana Sight] wasn't quite at the level of Vex's, but even he saw the way the mana acted — it was far different than any spell either of them had seen before. The ambient mana that surrounded them had shied away once he'd started casting his new spell drew closer as the painting was completed, and when it was done...

The mana dove into the painting, and brought it to life.

Neutral mana turned into fire and ice, this time with far more vibrancy and life than even [###### Night] had offered. Balls of fire flickered in the air like floating bonfires, emanating a heat that hadn't been felt earlier through Derivan's use of the skill; the fog that drew around them was cold, grass freezing into shards of ice at its touch. Vex's use of [Delineate] didn't seem to protect them from the effect, either.

Still — for all that the effect was powerful, and threatened to burn and freeze them all at once — it never got close enough to them to actually harm them. Unlike Derivan's skill, it stayed in place, hovering just above where the painting had been. In a few short minutes, it began to dissipate, aspected mana turning back into a lifeless neutral, and that neutral mana collapsed back onto the ground like liquid.

Vex swallowed once, and slowly dismissed the skill.

"That was... something," he said softly. Derivan glanced at him.

"It was," he agreed.

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