MAGUS INFINITE

Lightning runs to lightning. The body was a source now, the brightest source in the basin, and as long as I kept this Title active, this source would be bright enough to cover the entire world... The boy did not know the true depths of his capabilities, and his soul was still too small to cover the heavens, but in time, that would change.

There is charge in dead flesh the way there is salt in dead earth, and I lit the severed arm with a thread of the title’s current and made it, briefly, a source too, a lesser pole to the body’s greater one, and following the laws that bind the firmament, the lesser ran to the greater the way the lesser always does.

The arm leapt off the ground and crossed the dozen paces and slapped into the stump of the shoulder, and I held it there with the current while I did the boy’s own trick better than the boy does it.

The Loom. The boy weaves it like grass, but I command. The lightning was already mine, every arc of it answering my will, and I wished a hundred threads of it through the seam where arm met shoulder, in and out, in and out, stitching dead meat to living like a field surgeon stitches a wound, except my needle was lightning and my thread was lightning and the wound closed in the time it took the fox to finish reknitting itself.

I flexed the reattached hand, and the fingers answered. These two arms were crude but functional.

My eyes had never left the fox, and when it came again, despite not fully healing its wounds, I met it with both hands and began to take it apart.

Emotions were a weakness, and even this Heavenly Beast would fall to its own.

∞

We fought across the dying basin, with a vast white tentacle tearing the heavens in the distance. Somewhere, the third warning from the Caelith sounded, and three more massive tentacles joined the first, and the fox and I were battling in their center, as demons with vast leathery wings that could cover a mountain flew above us; every beat of their wings was a hurricane.

Yet, none of this could touch us; I did not care if this world shatters, and the Moon Fox was filled with nothing but hate and pain... distracting emotions, but I could see how it gave the beast focus.

Every motion the body made was the shortest line to the fox’s harm and the longest line from my own, and where those two lines crossed, the fox bled old-night blood, and the body did not.

The Heaven Beast was faster than the body, and I made the body’s slowness irrelevant by never being where its speed was aimed. I read its moon, learned in three exchanges that the moon’s light fell a quarter-second before the body moved, and after that I simply stepped out of the light before the strike that followed it, every time, monotonous, perfect.

It tried the subtraction-blow again, and I fed it the dead leg. It tried to reach the link and reverse the leash, and I snubbed the slack again and let the failure cost it a heartbeat, and in the heartbeat I poured a converging lattice into its skull and lit its head from inside until the red eyes guttered.

The howl of pain from the beast was attracting attention, but the focus of the demons was on digging out the Pale Matron from her chains, and I could see more eyes shifting towards me, their cold intelligence scanning the battle.

They would want the Moon Fox, a Heavenly Beast was a prize that was rare to find, but duty held them bound for now, and that gave me time to fight.

The Beast had lost a lot of its heavenly grace and power, but what it had was still dangerous.

It poisoned the ground under me, and I was airborne on a discharge before the poison climbed past the ankle, riding Storm Bearer’s own current the way the boy rode Lightning Incarnate, except I let the lightning carry the thing it loved most, which was now the body, and it bore me up gladly and set me down behind the fox’s guard.

I put my reattached hand into the wound in its side and called every arc in the basin home at once.

The discharge went off inside the Moon Fox like the eruption’s own heart detonating. I could hear the sky above shatter as a massive crater hundreds of meters across tore the earth below our feet... the shockwaves should travel for miles, and if Demon Slayer was active, I would have completed the fifth gate in this instant.

However, this was a trade-off I would have to give for power.

The half-moon above the fox cracked, the sliver of pale heaven-light splitting down its middle, and the fox folded around the wound and went down, liquid-darkness body guttering toward something spent.

It was not dead. I had known from the first that it could not be killed here, not by the body, not even by me; a thing of the heavens does not die in the dirt of a single world. But it could be broken. It could be brought low enough that it would accept terms.

And terms were what I had come up out of the deep to give it.

∞

I knelt on the fox’s guttering body, grabbing the cold link that ran between us, cold and taut, the leash the boy had inherited and the fox had tried to steal.

The fox had wanted to reverse it. I would not let it reverse, and I would not let it dangle, since a half-bound thing is an inefficiency, and inefficiencies become deaths.

I pulled the link taut, and I set it. I drove the hook the rest of the way home from our end, deeper than the fox had ever managed to drive it, past the place where it could be torn loose, into the welded core of our shared soul where the Lightning Law Shard sat, and I made the binding the boy had stumbled into a thing of iron.