I held onto my mind with hands made from iron; none of that was real. This was just my fears expressing themselves, and if I allowed this thought to infect my mind, then with my enhanced soul, it would drive me mad because I would not be able to tell real from fake anymore.

It was as if I had held onto a bolt of lightning, and it was dragging me through the sky. If I let go, then I would fall safely to earth, the memories would stop, and my fear and trauma would no longer have teeth, but that would mean that I would not be able to claim this soul as my own, and my ascension to the rank of Adept would be stalled forever.

If this were the Elric of the past, then he would not have hesitated to let go. The power that I had now was what the past me had imagined he would gain after a century of life, and there was no way to reach for more, but I knew that if I let go, all of this nightmare would become real.

I did not go through all of this hell to allow myself to fall at this moment.

"You are not real!" I screamed, both inside my head and outside, and above thunder boomed, as if it echoed my cry.

The clouds above were becoming darker, and it was expanding to the extent that I could no longer see the red sky. I was barely aware that the demons had stopped moving, but my focus was claiming this soul as my own, imprinting it with real memories and not my fears.

And then I discovered that although these memories carried many painful wounds, most of these wounds were recent, and beyond that was a lifetime of joy, laughter, and warmth... There was so much darkness inside me, but there was light as well.

I had been allowing the pain to take charge of my mind, and I forgot there was so much to Elric Voss besides the pain. The heavy wind from the gathering cloud above made the charms attached to my staff behind me ring, and I remembered where I came from and the reason I was standing.

The road to freedom and the wound I was going to bear were the same, and I just had to walk a little further up both. Where was it told that you could gain great power without paying an equally great price?

As I accepted this, I felt a mental click in my head, and my soul trembled. I had noticed that during this entire struggle, I had not fallen or gone on my knees.

I had been broken before by the corruption of a demon, and now I observed that the second time you bear a thing, you bear it standing. That is not strength, exactly. It is practice, and I have had a great deal of practice.

Dying was a great teacher.

Up, said the Avatar in my soul, unprompted, which it had never done before, and which I decided not to think about yet.

I was already standing. I stood anyway, nothing was going to break me again.

I heard what I thought was a sigh... I mean, look up, your tribulation is coming.

"Oh... fuck me!"

∞

As I looked up to the light of a coming storm, I knew that it was not weather.

I had thought it was a side effect from power so loud it bent the sky, the way an Adept’s casting pulls clouds, but I was wrong. The storm was coming from inside me, and it was the sound my soul made while it changed state.

Closing my eyes, I heard the sound of a single drop of Anima land inside the core of my Anima Depth, and my eyes flew open. The state of my Anima was changing.

Let me explain, because I did not understand it either until it was killing me.

The Anima the Third Gate had poured into me was Creation-Anima at Tier Three, and it had arrived denser than anything I’d carried. The gaseous brightness of my Anima, the high-quality vapour that could power an Adept’s spells, was thickening, becoming liquid.

And a liquid Creation-Anima soul, it turns out, is not a thing this world permits.

My acknowledgement of this truth did not change what was happening above me, as the cloud began to fold.

To see something like this horrified me to the core. Imagine you could see black clouds stretching from horizon to horizon, and suddenly they were folding in on themselves, layers of darkness pressing against each other, compressing, becoming dense. And at the center of the compression, a light that transformed from red to white and finally, gold.

It was almost as if the entire damned planet was rejecting what I was becoming. Perhaps, Celestial Anima inside a mortal body was not permitted.

∞

The sky answered before I finished the thought and sent down a bolt of lightning.

That first bolt did not look like lightning. It looked like a decision, a golden line drawn from the dark place in the sky straight down towards me, and unlike my lightning, which was almost gentle in its violence. This was golden, thick, slow, and heavy, but I knew I could not outrun it even if I ran to the ends of the earth.

It descended from the folded cloud like a spear thrown by a giant, and it struck me in the chest.

[Crack]

I did not feel the impact. I felt the judgment it was imposing on my existence. The lightning was weighing my essence, testing everything I was and was going to be... and it found me wanting.

My ribs cracked open, and my Celestial Marrow splintered under the gold light. My heart, the slow-drum core of Cor Telluris, stuttered.

I was able to see my core before it tore open, and the silver-white essence of my soul, mixed with my silver blood, poured into the sky, and for a moment, I thought I saw a massive eye in the sky, and that moment passed as the second lightning bolt descended.

In red lines, my status screen shoved this information in front of me...

[Anima Depth: 70 → 68]