The white fire died, and the bowl went quiet, and I stood in the centre of a crater that had been a battlefield, looking at fifteen heaps of cooling ash where fifteen mountains had been.
The staff in my hand was gone, and I stared at the space where my right hand had been holding something a moment ago. The skin was blackened, the layer of skin gone, but the muscle beneath was already knitting. Celestial Blood silvered the raw edges.
[Staff Resonance: 43 → 0 — Focus destroyed]
[Note: Bond severed. Staff Resonance skill suspended pending new attunement.]
The notification flickered and vanished. This was the first time I had seen this notification after my staff was destroyed, and I observed it with curiosity before pushing it out of my vision.
The ground around me was a spiderweb of molten furrows where the lightning had risen from the wet earth. The Khaazim that had surrounded me were ash, their outlines still visible as dark stains on the charred ground.
Beyond them, the rest of the swarm, the Khaaz and the Khaazim, had stopped, and tens of thousands of eyes were looking at me. The power that I had released a moment before may have affected just forty meters around my position; it had been loud and bright enough, and it had been observed for miles.
The silence lasted for one heartbeat, then two, then a strange cry erupted in the distance. I had always imagined what the sound of a poisonous snake would be like if it could scream, and now I had a hint of it.
I froze in place, and the ground began to shake as the demons began pouring towards me like a flood. Driven by that sound like a whip.
The atmosphere around me, stretching to the distance, had changed, as a will that was so strong it was almost tangible flooded the world.
I shivered, and the soul-meld part of me, the Hollow Avatar, whispered, Khazarahn, Queen of the Swarm.
The thrill of my growth vanished as the ground shook from the flood of demons washing towards me. Would this ever end?
I had no staff to focus my spells, no weapon except the lightning that lived in my bones and the new channels that were slowly being threaded through every muscle, every organ, every centimetre of my rebuilt body.
I reached for the staff’s remains, and the charms were still there, blackened but intact.
I picked them up. Threadwork at fifty-six was enough to weave a simple cord from the remnants of my robe, and I tied the three charms around my left wrist.
"You stay with me," I said to them. "I’m not done."
One notification that I had been ignoring flashed past my eyes.
[Second Earth Gate — Evolution Complete]
[Ascendant Earth Gate (Epic)- Growth]
[Active Bonus: +12 Anima Depth, +40 Endurance]
[Substrate Infusion: Creation-Anima, Tier Two]
[Third Earth Gate - Unlock Requirement - Stored Essence: 14,800/50,000]
-The demons were not always children of Abaddon. They are Fallen, rid them of the burden that their lives have become.
I briefly scanned through the Tier Two infusion and the requirement for Tier Three. This was a small thing, but it went a long way to settle my mind.
Whatever was happening, I was growing and getting stronger, and fear was not needed in my mind; what I needed was focus.
Then I checked my soul.
∞
My Anima Depth was low. Killing all fifteen Khaazim, especially that final ground discharge I made, had nearly emptied me.
But it was climbing, I could feel it. The gaseous Creation-Anima was recovering at a rate that I was sure would have made an Adept weep with envy; at least I know that what I had just recovered in seconds would have taken me hours of calm meditation to recover in the past.
Give it a few minutes, and I would be back to nearly full, and that sort of ridiculous recovery was another pillar that added a new layer of confidence to my heart.
I did not have a few minutes, because the horde pouring towards me would be here in less than a minute, but I was no longer afraid.
Another foghorn from the pyramid sounded, and this one was even longer than the previous blast, and I lifted my head and looked past the boiling army to the pyramid.
It sat on the far plain like a wound that had decided to be a mountain, black and faceted and far too large, and the demons were not coming toward me from a hundred directions. They were coming from it.
I could spend hours fighting the hordes of demons and fall in after killing tens of thousands, and I could keep doing it in every loop, but I needed answers, and those answers would come from the pyramid.
Ask the pyramid, something in me said, in a voice that might have been the Hollow Avatar’s and might have been older than that.
"Fine," I said, out loud, to the horde, and the red sky and the damned pyramid in the distance. "Let’s go ask."
I raised my flayed hand, and I had no staff to raise, and I cast Lightning Dominion anyway.
∞
Here is the thing nobody at the Academy ever told me, because nobody at the Academy had a Celestial skeleton: the staff was training wheels.
The wood had never been the magic; it was a focus, a thing to point the soul through because a soft human body was not built to be the conduit.
But my body was not soft anymore. Two hundred and eleven Cor Telluris channels, a skeleton that conducted like a struck bell, Lightning Resonance running through flesh that no longer cared if lightning lived in it... all of this meant that I did not need a stick to point through.
I was the stick.
The field bloomed from my body directly, no staff, no anchor, blue-white and close, wrapping me in fifteen metres of saturated death that moved when I moved.
I knew that this field could be expanded to sixty meters if I wanted, but pulling it closer to me magnified the potency of the lightning within it.
The field was now a domain I wore, a storm with me at its eye, and the recovering trickle of new Anima fed it because Field Sustain only needed me to light the match, and the channels did the rest.