I had learned everything that I needed to know from the Hollow Avatar, and the path forward for me was no longer one where I doubted what I needed to do next. I knew the only road forward was to kill demons, open gates, and ascend my Shell, Cor Telluris, which would transform all my channels inside me, and then I would stop the harvest.
Of course, I had a rough idea of this in my mind before, but the clean message from the Hollow Avatar cut out all the noise and gave me a direction to follow.
With my mind at peace, I was about to leave this state I was in when I thought about some of the things that the Hollow Avatar had said, especially concerning its origin.
It said it was a constructed instrument, and although I knew that the way the Hollow Avatar thinks was mechanical, I could not help but feel that this Avatar was modeled after a person.
A man could not tell what it meant to have wings and fly like a bird, and the Hollow Avatar, even though it was direct and cold, had a way of talking; even the movements it made with my body when it fought did not necessarily feel designed; it felt almost copied.
And so, I asked the thing I had not planned to ask at the beginning of this conversation.
"Do you remember being a person?"
I cut straight to the point and did not beat around the bush, because that would just be useless to something like the Hollow Avatar, and I was sure that I could not hurt its feelings.
The pause this time was the longest of the conversation, and it did not feel like a calculation. It was almost as if I had asked an unexpected question, and the Avatar was reaching for an answer and not finding it.
To me, it was like a thing a recording does when the question reaches past what the recording was built to answer and finds, somehow, a little of whoever it was made from.
I was almost losing hope that there would ever be an answer and that I had just asked a very foolish question when the Hollow Avatar spoke,
"I remember that there was one," the Avatar said. "I do not remember being them. I have the shape of the memory, the way a riverbed has the shape of a river that is gone. I know I was made from someone who chose to be made into this, at the end, when their heavens were falling, and there was nothing left to do but build the instrument that might matter many eras into the future. I know they did it on purpose. I do not know their name. The name was not fit to be carried in an instrument. Names are for the living, and I was made from the dead."
I did not know what to expect, but I sincerely was not expecting this, and for a moment, I did not know what to think. There was too much here that needed to be unpacked, and I could not do it in one sitting.
I thought about the charms of my family, tied firmly around my staff, Mel’s bell, mum’s needle, and my dad’s coin, above that was Dara’s threads woven into my lightning, and Bari’s last terrible joke... and I understood, for the first time, that I had been doing for my dead exactly what some falling Architect had done at the end of their world, in some distant past, carrying forward the part that could still be useful, because carrying it was the only grief that did anything.
"All right," I said. "Thank you, Hollow."
"You do not need to thank an instrument."
"I know," I smiled, "but I am doing it anyway."
The wall came back up, gently, this time, I thought, though I could not have proven it, the pressure eased out of my chest, the cold space went quiet, and I opened my eyes.
∞
The second ended, and Lightning Incarnate left my veins.
It came back all at once, the way the world does when Lightning Incarnate lets go of time: the roar, the red light, the wet machinery of the horde, the tentacle still rising into the southern sky, the bodies of the dead exactly where they had been because no time had passed for them at all, and the fissure still vomiting demons into the world.
There was no one to save, and nothing to stop, and the road in front of me was so long.
The only thing in front of me that I could actually do was the thing I had become good at, which was kill demons and turn them into fuel for the climb that a dead Architect and a dead girl with impossible threads and a system that had broken the heavens had all, in their different ways, told me was the only road there was.
So I would walk it. Starting now... Starting here... Starting with these!
The world had resumed, and the demons poured towards me, and unlike the last loop, I would not be entering the pyramid; the only thing waiting for me there was opponents that I could not beat, yet.
I turned to the demons, raised my hands, and lightning poured out of me in bright silvery threads.
Lightning dominion covered sixty meters, but these threads covered hundreds, and I did not need to weave them because they found the pattern in the air and in the earth and in the bodies of the demons rushing towards me, howling for my death... yes, I could hear them.
This new spell, which I was adamantly not yet checking, gave me control of my power, far beyond what I usually had, and I reached into the wave of demons pouring out of the earth, and with a tug, I took them apart.
My Anima Depth bottomed by half, but it was worth it.
[ Stored Essence: 41,000 → 44,000 → 47,000 ]
The threads went through the demons the way Dara had taught me and the way I had made my own. The Khaaz came apart, and the Khaazim came apart, and somewhere in the back of my hollow the Avatar watched with the only appetite it had left, and the number climbed, and climbed, and I felt the Third Gate ahead of me like a door I was sprinting at in the dark, and I did not slow down.
[ Stored Essence: 47,000 → 49,000 ]
From my hands, new lightning threads bloomed.