The first thing I could sense was a thing that felt strange and resonant, like a staff, yet not a staff, like a nascent truth that wasn’t true, and felt like upgrading, improvement, refinement, adding new things, evolving, changing, and…

I shook myself. It was getting into my head again.

I focused and spun through dazzling stardust, and then I saw it.

A small meteor, streaking down from the heavens, a crystalized ball of ice that felt deeply intense to my mana senses. Within the meteor, I could feel the thing that was resonance, adaptive and changing. I stretched out my fingers to try and catch the meteor, not thinking at all. If I had been, I’d have been worried about it taking my hand off.

It struck my palm and bounced, and I took off after it, angling my cauldron to chase it across the bogs. I grabbed it, and it flew from my hand again, then I Foxstepped over and snatched it. My cauldron started to plummet, so I flickered back inside, holding the… thing… tightly.

I came to a stop in the cauldron and watched as the ice slowly melted away, turning into steam as the item was revealed.

It was a smooth black orb that hovered in mid-air, slowly spinning. I reached out and touched it with one finger.

It bit me, a tiny probe stabbing into my finger like a mosquito, then I felt a wash of knowledge mana, strange and warped, with aspects that I couldn’t understand, rush through me.

The moment it found the slot in my spirit where my staff lay, I felt it narrow in, locking onto the staff like the inevitability of a Pinpoint Boneshard spell aiming for its designated target.

Without any intention, my staff appeared in the air next to me, and the black orb unfolded like the maw of a squid or lamprey, and it ate my staff.

A horrified jolt of panic flooded through me as I felt my connection to the staff snuff out, and the orb-mouth-thing replaced it entirely. It then expanded outwards, establishing a spirit bond of some sort, though I couldn’t make out the details.

I braced myself for searing pain, but having bonded both Dusk and the Beastmark, there was actually a bit of room for more connections.

The orb ate this space greedily, and I had a moment of fear that it was going to keep expanding, outpacing my power and risking breaking, but then it stopped. The orb folded back in on itself, and it went silent.

Strange lights with a color that I couldn’t describe began to spin across the surface of the orb, then it began to transform and shift again. This time, rather than some vast mouth, it warped and shifted, bucking unnaturally. Another moment of fear passed as it shifted, and I was worried it was going to eat me.

Instead, it transformed into a staff exactly as tall as I was. It was a matte black, covered in swirling green spell designs. The spread-crystal that I used for my Temporal Basin floated a finger’s width above the staff, spinning gently, like someone had created a spinning pedestal of force magic for it to rest on.

Orbiting around the spread-crystal, like planets orbiting a sun, was three strange bits of metal. They looked like they were made of silver, or maybe steel, and were covered in markings so thin and fine that I would have needed a lens spell or a magnifying glass to make them out.

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I felt the automatic spinning, empowering, and restoration effects of the staff slide neatly into place again, but they were noticeably weaker than they’d been before. It wasn’t devastatingly weak, but it felt like it was maybe three quarters of what it had been initially.

A part of me had been hoping to get the staff to automatically upgrade, since the orb thing had given me the overwhelming impression of evolution, but it hadn’t. Still, I thought it had simplified it somewhat – I could feel a way to slide mana sources and solidified mana trimmed from my mana-garden into the staff to grow it automatically, without the need to collapse and reform the staff each time.

I was a bit disappointed, honestly. Losing a quarter of the increases that the staff gave to mana regeneration and power for just the ability to not need to redo the ritual… Wasn’t worth it.

More than that, it had taken several seconds. I could feel things passing me by in the cloud of starstuff, things that I could have used!

Then the three silver shards rotating around the spread-crystal began to glow. The runes or whatever they were seemed to scan me, and I felt them reach out.

I had almost formed a Nascent Truth of Mercy once before, and when I’d rejected it, I’d forcibly evolved it into a Nascent Truth of Benevolence. Benevolence had never gone away, I’d always had it lingering around my spirit as an option, if I were to decide to cast away my staff. I’d simply never had a reason to.

I liked Benevolence as an ideal, and I strove to follow it, but the staff offered practical benefits that I wasn’t sure benevolence would. After all, an ill suited Nascent Truth was going to do more harm than good, and I did enjoy fighting.

Two of the three spinning metal shards went dull, but one of them began to glow faintly, as it reached out and connected to where I’d touched on Benevolence. It created some sort of strange artificial connection to the Nascent Truth, then funneled that connection into me. I felt a bit of Benevolence’s power trickling into me.

It wasn’t much, not compared to what it could be, at least in theory, but it was still there. I flexed my spirit, and felt the resonance flow through it and into me.

I didn’t have a good baseline example of what a Nascent Truth felt like, but I’d experienced other forms of resonance briefly, and this felt like roughly a quarter of what a complete form of resonance should be.

It felt… strange. Like trying to walk after my legs had fallen asleep. But the moment the Benevolence connected to me, I immediately felt it yank on me.

For an instant, I thought that my newly evolved staff was going to try and consume my spirit, but no, it was distinctly the Truth that was pulling me. I let my cauldron fall into Dusk’s realm as I Foxstepped through the cloud of spacedust, catching myself with Immovable Lock and teleporting again.

Before I knew it, I was on the ground next to a… a… Well, I wasn’t entirely sure what it was.

It looked like a long and thin dragon or tarragon, the sort with a more serpentine body and no wings, but with antlers and a mane. Its body was made entirely out of burning light, like the sun. Like the sun, it was capable of growth, but it was also capable of burning to ash anything that opposed it.

But it was small, young, vulnerable, more than a tarragon or dragon should be.

And its body was translucent and felt intangible. I couldn’t sense any energy in its form, but rather the strange sort of spiritual power, like when Dusk had used her legacy and spiritual truth to call upon her Dominion early, or how she used it to shape the world now.

But I could feel something deeply wrong with it.

Of the deep mana, destiny was the one I had the least experience with, but I could feel it here.

And it was bad.

It wasn’t twisted into a perversion of itself, like the Loyalty-Spark that Ikki’s father had tried to offer me, forcing destiny to bend to the whims of the Storm King.

It was more like when I used Burn Future to push my way through a fight. It had somehow, through some magic and spiritual property I didn’t understand, drawn on destiny to survive the fall, but it owed destiny now.

And it hadn’t drawn enough.

Hadn’t, or maybe couldn’t.

It needed support in order to live. It was fading and dying away even as I watched, and while I might be able to feed it drops of destiny to nullify the debt, that wouldn’t matter if it didn’t live.

I remembered what Octavian had told me, a long time ago, about how he’d bonded to Aracelli in order to save her life when her egg had been cracked.

I had one bond left, I could save this spirit… dragon… creature.

I knitted my eyebrows together. Hadn’t I heard of a spirit dragon before? The river dragon at the library had mentioned it.

I mentally slapped myself. Focus. I needed to focus.