Holding so much tribulation lightning inside my channels was torture, but I had several factors keeping me alive, from my enhanced channels made from Cor Telluris, my Lightning Resonance, Endurance, Mortal Shell, and finally, my Legendary Title, Storm Bearer, which made me immune to lightning a level above me, and for higher-order lightning, reduced their harmful effect on me.
It was the combination of all these factors that kept me alive as I replied to the judgement of the heavens.
"You ask me, what makes me worthy? To tell you the truth... I don’t think I am."
I show the heavens my doubt and despair. The moments where the only thing that kept me going in the loop was the fact that my powers were creeping forward, and even for a thing that cannot stay dead, I sometimes wanted it to end more than I wanted to win, and that was the reason I would have accepted the first offer from the Jade Oracle... I just wanted it to end.
"I... I feel these things, but under it all, there is more, the real core of who I am, and it takes moments like these to make me see them."
So I showed the lightning that threaded through every death and every kill and every grey morning, the thing I have never been able to kill no matter how many times the world killed me:
The stubborn, furious hope that I would go home.
This was it... There were no grand ideals; I did not want to be stronger than everyone else. I just wanted to go home at the end of everything.
"That," I tell the heavens. "That is what makes me worthy. Not that I climbed. That I kept climbing when there was no reason to, toward a door I’m not sure opens, carrying people who don’t know I’m carrying them. And for those who would deprive me and so many others of this simplest of desires for the lowest of reasons... I judge them unworthy of life!"
∞
The golden lightning held me up, and for a moment I thought I saw the massive eye look into my soul, and that moment stretched for an eternity.
In those eyes, there was confusion, and I thought it was because the answer I gave was not what they were expecting. The heavens did not understand compassion; they understood struggles, dominance, and the changing state of things... they did not care if there was one man left on the surface of the world or a billion; they were only concerned about the overall order that ruled nature.
At this moment, the heavens had no way to judge me, for in a sense, I had exceeded what they knew how to control.
Then the heavens did something I did not expect... they turned the lightning to me, and asked the deepest part of me to judge me, and this was more dangerous than any judgement it could have made.
Think about it for a moment, it was easy to say something, to claim that you have changed, or believe that you would pursue a goal, but when that claim is put to the test, many would fail this test.
The lightning turned the spotlight to my soul, and if the core of me did not believe what I just proclaimed, then I would unconsciously tear myself apart.
In this arena of the soul, there was nowhere to hide; I could not just deflect and bluff my way out of this situation. If the core of who I was could not be confirmed by my own heart, then I would fall.
To wield the power of heaven, I had to be pure of heart and intention.
I realize this is the moment, the real one, that I have spent hundreds of loops keeping behind a door. My core is crystallizing. Right now, under the heavens’ gold, the porous thing I have been is setting hard, and a magus is supposed to have years to choose what it sets into, and I have the length of one lightless moment, and the heavens have stepped back to let me choose.
This was both the greatest of blessings and the greatest of curses, and there was a chance that if I made a mistake with this, the result would be very bad.
So, in this eternal moment, I asked myself... Who am I? Who do I choose to be?
And so many paths opened up before me, and I knew that I could walk any of these paths and the heavens would accept my choice, and there lay the trap.
∞
I could choose the cold nature of the Hollow Avatar.
It was the brightest road in front of me. It would be easy. It would even be smart. I would have the Avatar’s certainty without the Avatar, a self that counts graves and feels nothing, that judges and does not grieve.
The loop has been driving me toward this path for hundreds of deaths. Grief is heavy, and hope hurts. I have held a Narghul’s soul dissolving in my hands and told myself it was necessary, and with this path, I could simply believe the necessary without hating, and would suffer so much less.
The crystallizing core reaches for it, because it is the path of least pain, and it was easy for a heart to choose the shape that hurts least.
By all the lights in heaven, it was tempting, but I refused it.
I reach into the depths of me, and I take the heaviest things I have, the grief that I would leave a hole in my family, the sorrow I felt when my friends died, and I knew that what I was seeing was just the beginning of the madness.
I reach for that stubborn hope that costs more than anything, knowing that it can be disappointed, and I set my core around those.
With the heavens holding the space and the lightning turning my channels to gold, I choose, deliberately, to crystallize into the boy who feels it, all of it, every grave, every sorry, every hope, rather than the construct who wouldn’t have to.
It is the hardest choice I have ever made, because I know exactly what I am choosing. I am choosing to be a mage that will pour himself into a door and grieve the morning sun forever instead of a mage that wouldn’t miss it.
I am settling permanently into someone who will hurt.
But it will be me who hurts. If this were who I would become in the next thousand years, I would be the one who loved, not the one who stopped having to.