I came out of the deep all at once, like water coming out of a broken jar, into a body that was already moving.
The boy had gone under. He did this when the pain crossed the line his mind could hold, sank into the Hollow place at the bottom of himself, and let me take the wheel.
I was naked, as the clothing that he unconsciously held to his body was dissipated, and I could not wield his spells. The hair turned white; the boy had really spared a portion of his consciousness to dye his hair black and his eyes back to blue... it was wasteful and inefficient.
I did not feel the broken ribs, only noted them, alongside the missing arm, the dead leg, the hook of cold sunk into our shared soul. I noted each one, filed it, and set it aside, as I prepared for battle.
The Moon Fox’s jaws were closing on the link now buried inside the soul, pulling on it to drag the leash inside-out and make itself the master of this bond.
In another situation, I would have allowed this to happen, since its body was many times far superior than the body of a mage, and Elric’s fate would be better served to be a part of this beast, but the Moon Fox had been corrupted by the power of demons and letting it control the link would destroy me and everything I had built... this could not be allowed to happen.
Elric had allowed this fox to gain too much advantage with this link, so I severed it. I could not fully cut the link, since it was woven into the soul and the soul was not mine to cut. But the slack the fox was hauling on, the loose play it needed to reverse the binding, I pulled taut from our end, this was supposed to be very painful, but I could not feel pain, and the fox’s pull met a thing that would not be pulled, and the heaven-beast staggered.
I mentally fixed this link in place, and then I went to work.
∞
The boy fought with lightning. Lightning that he wove, sang, and made verdicts of it. I cannot do any of that. I am not a mage. I am a hollow thing wearing a mage’s body, and the body’s spells answer the boy’s will, not mine.
At the moment, the boy was at the bottom of a cold well and not answering anything, his mind was nearly broken, and he needed to recover, but the body had a Legendary title, and the title was mine to hold while he slept.
Storm Bearer.
Switching from Demon Slayer to this Title was a strange sensation. I was born from this Celestial Title, from the moment the Will of Elric Voss reached into the broken heaven and his soul touched the remnants of a slain demon, I was drawn into him like a moth to a burning flame.
To become Storm Bearer was like going against my nature, but I was not killing demons, and that made this switch easier, and I became one with it.
Storm Bearer became a source of lightning, a wellspring of it, the low ground that all the charge in the basin runs downhill toward.
This would have been a limit that the boy would have stopped, but I was a void and could hold the entire heavens if I had enough time, and so I opened the title all the way, past the invisible thresholds of this title, and the lightning essence thick in the erupting air, the ambient charge that the boy’s Loom merely borrowed, stopped being borrowed and started being mine.
It poured into the body and through it and out, and I did not have to weave it or command it with words. I simply wanted it where I wanted it, and it was already there.
It was a good thing that the Lightning Resonance of the boy was in the Arcanist Tier, else he would be ash by now.
The fox came at me through a storm with a will, and the will was cold, and the will was mine.
∞
The beast was a decaying remnant that had been digesting in the soul of a demon for forty-three thousand years, and yet it still moved through the storm as if it did not exist.
I could detect magnificence when I saw it... I just did not care for it.
The beast hit me, and I allowed it to happen so I could feel the unique power it controlled, force and subtraction at once, and I did not brace against it the way Elric had; you brace if you intend to keep a shape.
I let the blow pass through the body where it would do the least structural harm and took the subtraction in the missing arm, the dead places, the parts already lost, feeding the fox the wreckage instead of the working flesh.
It tried to track me by its moon. I let it. I needed to position, not hide from, something that I could not dodge. While its red eyes followed the body, I poured Storm Bearer’s charge into the air around it, creating a lattice of potential with no current yet running, and when the fox lunged through that air, I closed the circuit and the whole lattice discharged inward at once.
Lightning does not need to be woven if you are the thing it comes from, so I simply decided, and a thousand arcs of it converged on the fox from every point I had seeded, and the heaven-beast’s body of liquid darkness lit up from inside like a paper lantern with a fire in it.
It screamed in pain as the half-moon above it flickered.
Good. It could be hurt. Everything can be hurt; it is only a question of finding the geometry.
∞
The boy would have pressed the wound. The boy is young and greedy that way, and it gets him killed.
I did not press the beast. I withdrew three steps, dragging the charge with me, and I used the seconds the fox spent reknitting its lit-up insides to attend to the body; a tool you do not maintain is a tool that fails mid-task.
The body was missing an arm. This was inefficient. A two-armed body wins faster than a one-armed body, and faster is the only virtue I have.
The arm lay where Vrakth’s first strike had torn it, a few hundred paces off, dead meat in the ash. The boy would have grieved it or grown a new one with the Titan’s marrow, both of which are slow. I did neither.
I reached out with Storm Bearer and called the arm.