The anchor was not a physical thing. It was a knot of the unique Soul Flayer’s power and will, twisted from the demon’s soul like a parasite’s root. I thought of it as a knot because I was borrowing this word from Elric’s experience. Elric thinks in threads and looms, and I was wearing his mind, since I was a part of his soul. It was closer to a root
I could feel the darkness that bound the Soul Flayer to the Sovereign’s body through the threads, and its arrangement was incredibly complex; using Elric’s soul capacity, it would take me decades to even think of unravelling it, even if I was given the manuals to its operation.
I poured the last of the lightning into the anchor, creating dozens of threads, coating every thread with Soul Forge to see if I was able to unravel the anchor.
The silver flame of Soul-Forge was consumption; although its tier was too low to destroy magic woven with the power of Law, it could consume some of its energies, thereby fraying the knot, especially since this knot was bound to the Soul Flayer’s soul, which was a thing that the Soul Forge was uniquely created to combat.
And something like this – I had it on good authority – was going to hurt.
The demon screamed; the sound was both of pain and fear. The Soul Flayer had not expected anything that was not a Sovereign to threaten its hold on the Sovereign’s body.
"WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!"
I did not answer. I could not. Every scrap of my will was focused on the threads and the silver flame, as I used every bit of power I had available to me to tear at the knot.
The darkness around me convulsed, and so did the body of the demon. The demon’s domain was reacting to the wound in its foundation, and I could feel the weight of the Law of Darkness pressing down on me, trying to crush me, since its body was becoming harder to control with the shock of the Soul Forge chewing through the knot.
I pushed harder, pulling every scrap of Anima I could draw from my Anima Depth and channels, and the silver flame blazed brighter. The anchor went a bit dim; perhaps a thousandth of its light had been lost, and if not for the eyes of the Moon Fox, I would not have seen this change.
This... far exceeded my expectations; the soul of Elric was turning out to be more potent than I had previously accounted for.
The shudder from the demon’s body was becoming nearly uncontrollable, and I saw the Soul Flayer’s yellow eyes go wide with a terror that was not feigned.
With a cry of rage, the demon’s claw caught me across the waist. I felt my ribs break before they were crushed, and then my spine, alongside a dull tearing sound as my body was torn in two and darkness flooded the wound.
A single thread of lightning I had kept aside tied me to the demon, and I held on, and Mortal Shell prevented the loss of blood from becoming catastrophic, as it held my insides inside my opened torso... I held on.
I held on through the pain that was data, through the darkness and the screaming of the demon and my dying body.
I held on long enough to see the anchor dim further, and the screams from the demon took a new dimension.
I had hurt it, and I could tell that the Moon Fox was smiling.
I gave a mental command to Mortal Shell, and it let go of my insides.
Death was closing around me, and the demon’s voice came from everywhere at once, raw and furious and afraid.
"WHO ARE YOU?!"
I did not answer because I had won; the life force inside me was too thin for even something like this demon to hold.
"I gave you such a great fate, deep in Sad’s bosom, but you chose... you chose... chose... chose... chose... chose..."
Even in the hands of death, I forced my eyes open, and I saw the darkness begin to retreat, and the transformation of the demon began to slowly reverse.
Its massive shape shrank until the body of the old man returned, and he looked around in confusion for a moment before glancing down at me.
At first, he did not seem as if he understood what was going on, and then he sighed,
"Thank you for this blessing, child. After an eternity of pain, I have this moment to remember what it is like to have my body again."
The old man looked up and laughed, "Lucius, you did not have to be so cruel."
The demonic transformation took over the body of the Sovereign again, and darkness began to erupt from everywhere.
I went into the dark with the screams of Sad in my ears, and I don’t know why, but the corner of my mouth bent a little. Am I... smiling?
∞
The body died.
I let the deep take me back down, and I pushed Elric up past me as I went.
The last thing I did with his eyes before they closed was point them, once, at the anchor, so that the image would be the last thing he carried down.
Even if he tried not to think about it, I knew that Elric was distracted by the thought of what was happening to his friends and family after three months of silence, so I showed him a path.
"Home," I told him. "Know how to kill a Sovereign, and you can go home."
∞
He woke with a bone spike halfway out of his skull and his own hand around it, and I settled back into the hollow place, spent, and yet larger than I had been.
I watched him breathe for a moment, to be sure the checkpoint had held.
It had. He did not wake up in the tent, and he was no longer near the Caelith Mourne; this was the second temporal door.
Then I went quiet, and I let him think he was alone in his own skull, because that is easier for him, and the data I had gathered was already sorting itself down in the dark where he cannot follow, into the shape of the three things I had kept for him and the many things I had not.
The anchor is a root... The fox can see it... The dark has an edge.
He is smart enough to use the information well in this loop.
The rest of what I had gathered is mine.