Vandimion

After the whole group crams into one small rented room for the night, Isidro and Serpico set out at dawn to hire a vessel bound for Skellig, the island where Elfhelm lies. Left with idle time, Schierke starts tutoring Farnese in magic under Casca's watchful gaze, while Guts stays abed to let the wounds from Flora's home and the beach keep mending.

Schierke has Farnese fix her eyes on an apple, then shut them and rebuild the fruit in her mind, but Farnese can only summon a smudge. Reassured that every beginner stumbles here, she listens as Schierke lays out the craft: magic is not merely runes and incantations but thought itself, which shapes the astral realm and, through it, the physical one. Each practitioner carries a luminous body, an astral echo of the self, and with time Farnese will grow her own.

Isidro and Serpico trudge back empty handed, their failure exactly as Guts foresaw. When Isidro floats the idea of stealing a ship, Farnese startles everyone by asking to take charge of finding one. Only Serpico, who has known her for years, grasps her meaning, and he hands over her old blade, its hilt bearing the four leaf clover that marks the Vandimion house.

At the family estate, Magnifico presses his father Federico to acknowledge his bureaucratic gifts and raise his rank, but Federico judges him unworthy beside his brothers Giorgio and Poliziano, now high placed within the Holy See and the nobility. Magnifico storms off just as a servant announces a visitor, a woman in men's attire who presents the clover blade and claims to be Farnese de Vandimion. Her name reaches Magnifico's ears as he departs.

Waiting in the great hall with Serpico, Farnese tenses as her father crosses the floor and looms inches above her. Federico speaks first, noting the ruin of the Holy Iron Chain Knights at St Albion; he claims not to fault her outright yet declares she must answer to the Holy See's inner court as the order's lone survivor, and he laments that she forever drags the family name low. He commands her to stay confined to the mansion and walks off. Steadied by Serpico, she turns back with tears in her eyes and asks for a ship, but Federico gives no reply and keeps walking, unaware, as is she, that Magnifico has watched it all from the balcony above. The twenty one page chapter ran in Young Animal issue 3 on 28 January 2005.