Damian held his Ama, and he held her carefully.
His body was enormous now, more than twice the size of the woman in his arms, and even though she had no physical form for him to bruise, he held her the way a person holds sothing they are afraid of damaging. Tenderly. With attention to every point of contact.
He had spent eight sumrs in a Dross tribe convinced he would never hold her again, scraping survival from poor soil while her loss sat underneath every day of it, and now he was holding her, and so part of him was managing his own strength against the possibility that he might sohow lose her a second ti through carelessness.
He had taken that tribe and raised it into the sky.
And now he was holding his Ama in his hands!
He was emotional, and he let himself be emotional, but he still looked at her with his obsidian eyes, and he still used every bit of his understanding of THE Primordial Tongue to look past the woman and into what she had beco.
He focused on the singularity of her existence.
It was fractured. The light that represented her did not sit whole the way the light of other beings sat whole. It was cracked through, held together by will rather than structure, and it had no container, no vessel to keep it organized the way a body kept a soul organized. She had been existing this way for years. Not living. Existing, which was a harder and more painful thing, the constant low effort of a soul holding itself together without any of the architecture that was supposed to do the holding. He could see, looking at it, how much it had cost her simply to continue. Every day. For eight sumrs.
The longer he looked, the angrier he beca.
He turned his head and stared at the Demon Emperor.
The Demon Emperor froze exactly where he was. He did not move an inch. He had the look of a being that understood, with total clarity, that any action taken in this particular mont would be the last action he ever took, and so he chose the only safe option available to him, which was to beco as much like furniture as a four-horned demon could manage.
His Ama floated up and turned his face back toward her own.
"My little prince has co," she said, and her voice held a serenity that her circumstances had no right to produce. "So why don’t you focus on your Ama for now? Are you able to do that?" Her illusory features softened. "Are you safe here, for now?"
She didn’t know the level of his power. She didn’t know what the situation was, or why the Demon Emperor himself had been the one to lead her son to her door. She only knew her child was in the heart of the demon empire, and a mother’s first concern was a mother’s first concern regardless of how the rest of the world had arranged itself.
"Nobody will be able to bother us or harm us here," Damian said. "Nobody."
His Ama smiled even more brightly at that.
Then she turned to look at Serala.
She took in the young woman standing a short distance behind her son, noticed how Serala matched Damian’s transford size, and noticed the apprehensive, slightly shy expression Serala wore now that the Empress’s attention had landed on her. The Empress’s eyes lit up. Whatever years of suffering had done to her existence, they had not touched the part of her that was a mother, and that part recognized a particular kind of situation imdiately.
She pulled her son toward Serala with a smile.
"And who is this young lady?"
Serala’s reply ca out shy. "Ama, I am... I was the Holy Daughter of the Covenant. Serala. It’s nice to et you."
...!
The Empress’s eyes lit up further at the word Ama.
She elbowed her son, a small motherly gesture that landed against a fra that could have stopped a charging Primal Beast, and the gesture carried the full and unmistakable aning of a mother comnding her child for sothing he had managed to accomplish.
"My little prince ca back with a Holy Daughter," she said warmly. "Good. Good! Now, if we are safe, let us retreat to my garden and catch up. There is so much I want to-"
Damian was looking at her.
He had not stopped looking at her existence the entire ti, at the fractured light and the missing container and the years of pain held together by will alone, and he could not watch her remain that way any longer. For the first ti since the Demon Emperor had handed her location over above the River of the World, he focused on her Source, and he found the arrow pointing upward, and he pressed it.
Words blood in front of him.
|You are a unique existence with access to THE Primordial Source. Elevation through THE Primordial Source offers a variety of options for you. Do you wish to transform the target linked to your lineage toward becoming a Source Lifeform similar to you, or simply an elevation of her existence?|
...!
Radiant words sat in the air before his obsidian eyes.
His reply ca resonant and certain. "I wish to elevate her toward becoming a Lifeform similar to ."
The mont he said it, the surroundings answered.
From every direction, radiant rivers of obsidian brilliance began to gush downward, flowing through the air of the garden and pouring toward the Empress. The light in these rivers was majestic in a way that the garden, the tower, the entire demon capital had nothing to compare to!
It was so grand, and the pressure it carried as it appeared was so absolute, that the mont it manifested, every being present apart from Damian, his Ama, and Serala simply fainted. The Demon Emperor dropped where he stood. The succubus who had been tending the herb collapsed beside the spiraling plant. The demonic birds in the garden fell from the air.
The obsidian rivers descended toward the Empress!
And as they did, the space above them split apart. From the fissures that opened in the air, even more radiant obsidian rivers gushed forth, and these poured toward Damian himself.
New words blood.
|While possessing access to trendous power, your first true elevation through THE Primordial Source has been utilized for the sake of another. This has elevated your status further.|
|Pure Primordial Essence now flows in dense concentration to both your target and yourself. This is among the highest and purest forms of essence across all of existence. Its integration into an existence forges the base and foundation of a Source Lifeform.|
|A single sliver of this essence is sufficient to forge the foundation of one Source Lifeform. Your existence and the existence of your target will each be bathed in rivers of it.|
...!
BOOM!
What blood afterward had a majesty that the garden, the tower, and the entire Empire of Hatred could not have produced between all of them combined!
The obsidian rivers poured into the Empress and into Damian both, dense and endless, and a grand transformation began to take hold of the fractured soul that had spent eight sumrs holding itself together through nothing but the will to keep existing for a son she had believed she would never see again.
The Empress looked at her son as she felt...skin and muscular begin to reform around her!
She looked at him with astonishnt, the astonishnt of a woman who had been suffering for years and had, in the span of a single reunion, been handed sothing she had stopped allowing herself to imagine.
And the transformation continued!
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