---
"Set an alert if my mana gets close to empty while during a training or fight," John thought.
[System: Alert will trigger at 25% remaining, then at 10%.]
"Good." He says while he yawns, "I am feeling sleepy too."
He breathed in through the nose, out through the mouth. The war on dirt fell away. The smell fell away. The thought of a dark star tethering a small patient shell did not fall away; it hung in the space between waking and sleep like a lamp left for latecomers.
He drifted.
In the quiet, the egg warm under cloth at his heart pulsed once, very faintly, as if it had heard a promise and filed it in the place where old things keep their truest maps.
The storage room door across the way did not open. It just sat. Waiting. It had done this for years: waiting for the next boy assigned, the next cart, the next bundle of horns and hide. It did not know that this time the boy who had to clean its stink would bring a small, hungry idea to it, and a very polite hole.
