Magic Stone

After dinner, Farnese and Puck take Casca to the mansion's bathhouse. Isidro loiters at the balcony door hoping to peek at the bathing women under cover of his youth, but Schierke catches him and clubs him with her staff. On a nearby balcony, Guts joins Flora with the beherit he took from the Count, asking what it is without revealing how he got it. Flora explains that beherits serve as doorways from the physical world into the deep Astral realm where the God Hand reside, and Schierke, overhearing from the bath balcony, is shaken by the exchange.

Guts demands to know how the stone summons the God Hand. Flora recognizes he seeks not to become an Apostle but to take revenge. When Casca bursts naked from the bath with a towel-wrapped Farnese chasing her, the sight lets Flora deduce Guts intends to bring Casca to Elfhelm, Puck's homeland, and she reflects on the cruelty that the same fire driving his revenge could consume Casca. She tells him a beherit cannot be triggered at will: as an object drawn from the depths of the Astral world, only a higher power controls it, ensuring that at the moment it activates it rests in the hands of its destined owner. If Guts is not that owner it will slip from him, and if he is it will always return, however impossible the odds. She hands it back, wishing it would leave him if it exists only to feed his vengeance.

Asked about the God Hand, Flora shares the little she knows: all five were once human, they dwell deep in the Astral realm, and they serve a being greater than themselves, seated in a layer so deep that no human can enter it and keep their sense of self. Overwhelmed, Guts decides he is content with the talisman for now and heads to bathe, meeting Schierke on the way. She has seen his Brand and names it a mark of one offered to the God Hand, asking whether he truly means to defy powers that command fate itself. He says he will, and walks on.

Schierke dismisses his answer as reckless, sure he underestimates his enemies. She then tells Flora what she felt seeing Griffith in Midland while riding a bird's body: though he looks human, he radiates an overwhelming flow of od that charms all around him, a spiritual presence beyond compare. Flora reveals Griffith is the very one who branded Guts, and warns her apprentice not to lean on her magic studies to predict the future, since Guts once stood against fate at the Eclipse and lived. She asks Schierke to treasure the coming journey with him for all it may teach her.

Flora explains that beherits are gateways to the God Hand and can be activated only by a destined owner, to whom the stone always returns. She shares what little is known of the God Hand's origins and their master. Schierke recognizes Guts' Brand as a mark of sacrifice and questions his defiance of fate, then recounts Griffith's overwhelming od, learning from Flora that Griffith branded Guts.

This twenty-one-page Millennium Falcon chapter appeared in Young Animal issue twelve on June 14, 2002. It deepens the lore of the beherit and the God Hand, links Guts' quest to reaching Elfhelm, and contrasts his stubborn defiance of fate with Schierke's dawning sense of how immense his opponents are.