The demon’s body collapsed into a rain of flesh and blood, and what I ripped out from him dragged itself from my grip and swallowed the remnants of the demon before it uncoiled out of Vrakth’s ruin far larger than the body that had held it.
It was a nightmare made of blood and shadow, the size of a Khaazim, its fur dripping with the ichor of thousands of years of imprisonment, its bushy tail of clotted darkness lashed the air, and where Aurora’s eyes were blue, this one was red.
The fox that towered over me shook its head, and suddenly more eyes opened on its face... six eyes like the demon. I blinked; this was new. Could the manner of death that Vrakth suffered or the way I ripped out the link have changed something in the fox?
I may not know this truth, but what I knew was that this was the same massive being Aurora was a facet of, and yet it was nothing like her.
The massive fox looked around before its six red eyes turned towards me, and I felt the connection between us resonate, and the beast instantly knew the truth after it felt it through the bond I carried.
Perhaps it would have been easier for me to have not made this bond so early, but there was no clean way to do this. The fox looked inside me and understood that I meant to take what was left of it and feed it to the small pure thing I kept.
I saw its rage and pain; not after it had suffered millennia of torture was it to be used as fuel, and I was not surprised that it instantly attacked me.
∞
The truth was that even up now, when I was under attack, I did not want to fight the fox. It wore her shape, even though it was a ruined, ancient, corrupted her; I could still see the shape of Aurora in her body, and every instinct I had recoiled from raising a hand against anything that looked like her.
For half a heartbeat I hesitated, and the blood and shadow fox crossed the distance, and its jaws closed where my throat had been.
I was not there just because I was reluctant, did not mean that I was slow. I had Stormstepped clear, and the jaws snapped shut on lightning. The demonic fox screamed, and I could hear Aurora’s voice in it; although it was warped, I could hear it, and that sound hurt to hear, because it was almost her.
The fox peered at me with its eyes, and its tail spread, becoming three, and then it attacked, using its tails to strike from different angles, attempting to attack me from all directions at once.
I gave ground to its assaults, dodging between its strikes, and through our bond, I could sense that the fox could see my reluctance, and it drove me back across the broken air with a fury that had Aurora’s cleverness in it gone rancid.
One tail caught me across the chest and opened me to the bone, and the pain was clarifying, causing my eyes to light up, even as the triumphant howl of the fox echoed across the sky.
It is not her.
∞
I stopped giving ground to the fox. This was not her. Aurora is asleep at the bottom of my soul, waiting for me to bring her what she spent. This is the thing she rose from, the corrupted original, the blood-and-shadow root, Vrakth’s twisted keeping of a Heavenly Beast that should have been light and had been made into a weapon.
It is not Aurora, I told myself; it is the cage-shaped thing that grew where Aurora’s greater self was chained, and if I let it live it will not become her, it will only be itself, corrupted, forever.
I could not save it; there was nothing in it left to save, only the essence, that one small clean facet of the same being asleep in me who needed it.
The fox attacked, and I caught it by the throat, as my body expanded to a terrifying fifteen feet, and the fox no longer dwarfed me, and my hand closed around its neck.
I held it at arm’s length while it thrashed and clawed at me. Its claws raked my chest, drawing silver blood, and its jaws snapped at my face, but I did not let go.
"I’m sorry," I whispered, feeling the pain and the panic through the bond I shared with this beast. "I’m sorry."
I tightened my grip, and I felt its neck begin to give way, and after a moment, the thrashing stopped.
I held the dying fox in my arms, and I felt the corruption that had been eating at its soul begin to fade, as the shadow that made up a part of its body began to disperse and it began to slowly shrink. But it was too late to save the fox; the fragment was too corrupted.
"I’m sorry," I said. I meant it, this time. It was not her, but it was made of the same stuff as her, and killing it felt like a rehearsal for a grief I never want to have.
∞
I reached into it and took the core. It sat where a heart would be, resembling a knot of concentrated Moon Fox essence gone dark. Aurora had shown me her core as she passed her vitality to me, and I realized that she was teaching me how to extract it when the time was right.
What I drew out of this fox was corrupted by demonic taint, but I was the right person to purify it.
Soul-Forge woke in me; it was at eighty-nine and had not crossed into the Arcanist Tier, but it would have to do.
I took the corrupted core into my channels, and I ran it through Soul-Forge the way you run ore through fire, burning the abyss out of it, stripping the corruption thread by thread until what was left was only cold silver moonlight, the true essence of a Moon Fox.
It took everything I had for the space of a few breaths, and it was one of the hardest acts of magic I had performed. And when it was done, I held, in the core of me, a small pure knot of purified Moon Fox essence, and I fed it down the bond, into the sleeping grey remnant of Aurora at the bottom of my soul.
’Here,’ I told her with a smile in my voice. ’I found the rest of you, or some of it.’