My channels were raw and empty, and only the reforged channels held Anima, but Staff Resonance worked with the intent from my soul, and despite the fact that my soul had been birthed anew from nothing, it was still mine.
The staff was four feet away in the ash. In my present state, four feet has never been farther.
I moved my arm, and the arm moved through a fire that lived inside my bones, and I want to be precise about this because it matters: I felt every centimetre of the motion I made, a pain that was impossible to describe.
The Avatar could have buffered it, but I did not ask the Avatar to buffer it. I had decided, loops ago, that the pain was mine, that the pain was how I knew I was still the one in here, and I was not going to give it away now just because it had become the worst pain I had ever felt by a margin I did not have the vocabulary to express.
Besides, I would hate myself if the reason this process failed was that I could not hold the other end of this process.
