Shooting Star

The merrow escort the ship toward Skellig, and Isidro guesses they linger because Isma, her legs restored, is aboard. She sets him straight: her people swim alongside out of thanks for help against the Sea God, and she herself is simply too shy to rejoin her mother in the sea. Below deck, Schierke speaks to Guts through thought, assuming he is deaf, but he proves his sight and hearing are returning by counting the fingers she holds up. Farnese, steering the flow of his od to speed his mending, moves him to say she has made him feel warm, and the compliment brings her to grateful tears now that she has found her place among the party.

Serpico's watch is interrupted when a moaning Casca drifts from her room. As the others rush to help, Puck discovers that the dark-haired boy is gone. A full search of the vessel turns up nothing, and Isma insists the merrow would have caught him falling overboard. Schierke recalls that the child has surfaced only under a full moon, when sorcery runs highest, and reasons he may be a scout sent from Skellig, or perhaps the doing of the Flower Storm Monarch.

Lying alone, his hand still trembling and a lantern reduced to a smear of moving light, Guts remembers the Skull Knight foretelling that the armor would rob him of speech, hearing, and sight, then brushes the warning aside. He drifts into a dream of Casca before the Eclipse, jolts awake at the memory of the Skull Knight's caution that his wish might not match hers, and worries over what she will become once her mind heals and the horror returns to her. His thoughts turn to Griffith. Gazing up, he mistakes a blur near the moon for the branches of an unseen tree, never noticing the boy perched there, who slips into the bough and is swept off like a falling star.

Guts confirms his senses are recovering, and Farnese finds purpose in healing him. The moonlight boy disappears from the ship. Schierke theorizes he is an emissary tied to Skellig or the Flower Storm Monarch. Guts recalls the Skull Knight's prophecies about the armor and about Casca, then watches the boy vanish into an invisible branch above the moon.

The twenty-five-page "Shooting Star" opens the Elf Island Chapter of the Fantasia Arc and ran in Young Animal issue twenty on 12 October 2012. It first carried the number 331 and was relocated to the 328 slot when volume 37 was compiled.