The pressure did not move.
He tried again with the same words.
Pressure. Move. Outward. Just slightly.
Something shifted. He could feel it respond, beginning to push toward his hand. Then it stopped, like it had run into a wall it could not cross. He pressed his fingers a little harder against his side. The pressure was there, just on the inside of wherever the barrier was, going no further.
It still follows the old instructions. The boundary is from before.
So I need to change the instructions.
He remembered the way the Bishopess had structured her chant. Short, specific, ordered. Not a wish. A command with parameters.
He tried again.
Open. Pressure. Move. Little amount. Towards my hand's fingertips.
This time it moved.
He felt it travel from the kidney, through his side, out through his skin and into his fingertips. A slow transfer, like something thick being pulled through a narrow space. When it finished his fingertips felt strange. Heavy, like something had been placed on them that he could not see.
So it can come out. Good.
His eyes were doing the thing they do when a person has been awake too long. He rubbed them without thinking about it, pressing the same fingertips against his eyelids.
I don't want to sleep yet.
The pressure moved.
Not back inside. Forward. Into his head. He felt it travel upward and settle somewhere deep, further in than he could point to. And then it just stopped being pressure. It was still there but it had gone quiet, like a sound that had been on all day suddenly switching off.
He sat very still for a moment.
His eyes were open. The room was the same. The paper was the same. The two moons were the same.
The tiredness was gone.
Not just reduced. Gone. He felt alert in a way that was slightly too clean, the way things sometimes felt in the first few seconds after waking from a deep sleep before the day came back. The irritability that had been sitting in the back of everything all evening was not there. His stomach was still making itself known, but only technically. It was the idea of hunger rather than the experience of it.
His heart skipped once.
That was not supposed to happen like that.
He checked his emotions the way you check a pocket you were not sure was empty. Fear was there but faint. Almost theoretical. He did not feel afraid of not being afraid, which probably said something.
I feel normal. Possibly better than normal.
That is probably fine.
He sat with it for a while.
The pressure changes things. That confirms it's from a warped space.
Which means I could have become a Devil in that warehouse. If the pressure had kept spreading instead of lodging in the kidney, the whole space might have started warping around me.
The man Aldric talked about. The one who became a devil that puts people to sleep. He was asleep when it happened. He didn't control it.
I was conscious. I moved it deliberately. That might be the difference.
He considered the question that followed from that.
If everyone who touched a Warped Space core could do this, people would be running into every warped space around trying to absorb one. They're not. So either I'm a special case, or the window to take control of it is very small. Or both.
He thought about magic.
If this were just magic, everyone would be doing it. The nuns at the camp used artifacts for almost everything. The mana transfers took effort and left people visibly tired. I just moved the pressure of needing to sleep into my head with a few words.
This is not the same thing.
One word from somewhere in the back of his reading history came to his mind.
Divinity.
The ones who fail to control it become devils. The ones who succeed—
He stopped himself there.
Don't get ahead of it.. [1]
He picked up the quill. There was still a little ink left in it from earlier.
He looked at the quill for a moment, then at his kidney, then back at the quill.
Purely economical reasons.
He opened the seal the same way as before and let the pressure begin to flow. This time he did not use short command sentences. He kept it open, kept it moving, and felt the whole path of it — kidney, across to the right lung, down the arm, into his fingers and into the pen. It was uncomfortable but not painful. Less severe than the first time.
While it flowed he held a clear thought about the pen.
This pen does not wear down. This pen writes without ink.
He held the image of what that meant. The tip staying sharp. The ink already there somehow, not running out.
The pen changed.
Not dramatically. It warped slightly at the tip, the way hot air looks above a road in summer. The ink inside thickened and darkened. Much blacker than it had been. Then it stopped. He closed the seal back on the kidney and felt the remaining instability in his body pull back inward like a tide going out.
The pressure was down. Not by much. Five, maybe ten percent. But he could feel the difference.
He took a fresh sheet of paper and wrote a few words in very small letters.
The pen moved without any resistance. Better than any pen he had used before. The ink came out perfectly even, perfectly dark.
His body began to warm. Not uncomfortably, but noticeably. Like mild exertion.
Energy cost. Why not for free? Should try again?
Haa.. Whatever lets continue.
He thought about the blue gel pen he had in secondary school. The ink shifted. The next letters came out blue.
He tried others. Something glittery. Something fluorescent. Each one worked.
Then he thought about gold ink.
The warmth became heat. Something behind his ribs felt like it was being pulled toward his arm. His legs went strange. He kept writing. The ink came out gold, metallic, catching the moonlight off the page.
As soon as he saw gold on the page he grinned like never before.
He stopped writing.
His vision had gone slightly soft at the edges. His legs, when he tried to move them, felt like they belonged to someone else. He was not sleepy. He was not irritated. He just had almost nothing left.
Anemia. That's what this feels like.
When they took blood for the test. That exact feeling.
He put the pen down carefully and looked at the paper.
Small test sentences in six different inks. The last one gold, slightly shakier than the others.
He got up slowly still grinning, made it to the bed without falling, and lay down.
The two moons were still in the window.
He was asleep before he could think anything else about them.
[1] What he meant to say was "No F*ck It we ball, I'm a god baby!"