My channels were raw and empty, and only the reforged channels held Anima, but Staff Resonance worked with the intent from my soul, and despite the fact that my soul had been birthed anew from nothing, it was still mine.
The staff was four feet away in the ash. In my present state, four feet has never been farther.
I moved my arm, and the arm moved through a fire that lived inside my bones, and I want to be precise about this because it matters: I felt every centimetre of the motion I made, a pain that was impossible to describe.
The Avatar could have buffered it, but I did not ask the Avatar to buffer it. I had decided, loops ago, that the pain was mine, that the pain was how I knew I was still the one in here, and I was not going to give it away now just because it had become the worst pain I had ever felt by a margin I did not have the vocabulary to express.
Besides, I would hate myself if the reason this process failed was that I could not hold the other end of this process.
Pain could fade, but regrets would last forever.
I did not see my staff rise from the ground; all I knew was that as my fingers closed, I felt the warmth of the staff through my palm... it helped a bit against the pain.
The wind took this moment to blow past me, and it whipped the charms above the staff into a frenzy, and their ring settled on my growing soul like balm over a burning wound.
The sound from these charms was small, but they were here, ringing in the middle of the worst moment of my life, and the sound of them was the sound of the reason I was doing this, and I held onto it the way you hold onto a rope in the dark.
My killers were coming, and I had no soul to cast with. The new one was at four percent and rising, and four percent of a Celestial-grade depth was not nothing, but it was not enough for Lightning Dominion either, not the way I had cast it this morning at full reserves.
I knew that I should be more amazed by what I was feeling growing inside me, my new Anima Depth was unlike anything that I had ever felt, but even that was nothing to the pain it was causing me as it grew, since every single point of growth came with an impossible amount of pain.
Focus, Elric, even though you are pain, the demons are coming!
My Anima Depth was too weak, but I knew that I had Anima in my channels. The funny thing was that I could not cast spells directly from my channels... before now, such a thing was not even possible, and I had not been trained for something like that.
Still, it gave me an idea for what I needed to do, as long as I could pull a bit of my Anima from my reservoir and send it through the appropriate channels as I unleashed lightning dominion, then the Anima in my channels would converge towards the spell because it was not a single cast but a sustained one.
Lightning Dominion would not need me to fund it forever; I only had to light the match, and my channels would slowly fuel it.
The pain was too much for me to even deliberate if what I was deciding upon was feasible; it had to work, else I had nothing.
I gathered everything I could, all four percent of the new depth. The trickle of Creation-Anima the Avatar could spare from the rebuild.
It was the knowledge of this spell and the instinct of casting that gave me the direction I needed, and I pushed it through my staff.
The pain of pulling Anima through a body that was still being assembled was... I am not going to describe it. There are limits. You will have to trust me that it was beyond the others.
And I cast Lightning Dominion.
∞
The field of lightning bloomed, and it was almost too small to be called a field. It was ragged at the edges, the sphere flickering where the Anima ran thin, the hum uneven because it was not being fed Anima in the right manner.
But it bloomed, and that was all that mattered, because the nearest demons were now so close to me that I could smell them through the pain.
The domain flickered around me, and twelve directed arcs snapped out toward the nearest Khaaz, the Conductive Leash catching and chaining through dozens more, and the first rank of Khaaz hit the field’s edge and died.
For a moment, my domain flickered and nearly vanished, but then... the field held.
It was the most desperate cast I had ever produced, and it was enough. The Khaaz crashed against the sphere, and the sphere ate them, automatically, the way it had been built to, the spell doing the work now that I had thrown the switch.
The Khaazim would be a problem the field could not fully solve, but the Khaazim were still in the distance, and distance was time, and time was what I had bought.
I had bought it with the only currency I had left, my own consciousness, because I could not stay up here. Nobody could stay up here. The pain was not survivable, and I had spent everything I had to throw the switch, and now the body needed to go back under so the Avatar could finish the rebuild, and so I could stop feeling my soul rebuild from nothing.
I held on for one more second and watched the field eat the Khaaz. And I thought, with the last clear thought I had before I went back down
"That’ll hold them. Finish my body well, hollow. I’ll be downstairs."
Then I let go of myself, and I sank into the deep.