I woke up, and I was drowning.

"Uuuuuupppppp..."

The world seemed to be nothing but darkness, and I could feel a thousand cold hands holding on to my soul.

"Uuuuuupppppp..."

External temperature approximately twelve degrees. Body temperature thirty-six point eight, standard human baseline. Sensory input nominal. Motor function unobstructed. No immediate combat threats detected within the tent’s eight-metre perimeter.

"What... where... Why do I see nothing but darkness? Who am I? What am I?"

Distance to nearest threat-source-Caelith Mourne approximately one kilometre east. Eruption countdown approximately forty-three minutes.

"Llllaaaazzzzyyyyy... Cccuuurrrr..."

My body was pressed down to the depths of darkness, but then, Mel’s voice, she brought me back.

"Mel, who is.. my sister. Right, Elric, loop, I have returned from the dead. Wake up, Elric... wake up, or you would be what your sister says you are... a damned lazy cur."

I lay on the cot and tried to remember how a sixteen-year-old magus woke up.

The canvas above me was the same canvas it had been at every wake since the expedition reached the camp.

I reached out, and my staff came to my side, and I brushed my fingers against the charms above the staff, and I began to smile when I heard them ring against each other.

I should have noticed those things first. The warmth, the canvas, the bell.

Elric Voss had noticed those things first across thirteen previous wakes, but the Hollow Avatar had noticed the threat parameters first.

The Hollow Avatar was not separate from me. The Hollow Avatar was in me, welded to whatever remained of Elric Voss at the end of the last loop, and I had carried the welded state across the reset, and the welded state had organised the wake before Elric could.

I recalled the warning from the first time I received Hollow Avatar, but with the help of this power, I had killed that horned demon.

Touching the charms again, I smiled, "Thank you for being here for me. You have to bring me back, Mel, mum, dad... You all have to bring me back."

The scale of what was happening was too big, and I could not bury my head in the sand.

I had to keep pushing because death would not release me from this madness, and no matter what the loop was making me become, I had to see it through.

The alternative was worse; the deaths of my friends here had shown me a glimpse of what was to come. What would a Khaaz demon do to Mel?

I shuddered... What would a Narghul Sorcerer do to my family?

I began to feel pain inside me, and I smiled. Pain had become meaningless in the last loop, and feeling this pain again meant my soul was back, battered and broken, but it was back.

My body had taken catastrophic damage and registered none of it when the Hollow Avatar took over.

I was not all back... I could feel it, but my consciousness was now dominant, and that cold part of me was below.

I had swum out of the pool of darkness, but I was still inside it.

There was a chance for me to run away from this darkness. Ah, who am I kidding?

From the moment I entered this loop, I either sank or swam... and too many fuckers have given me a reason not to sink.

I closed my eyes and felt the Hollow Avatar register the pain in my core as a parameter and noted,

non-tactical sensory input, low-priority, no action required.

I let myself feel this ache anyway. This was my soul, and everything that it contained was mine and mine alone.

I was Elric Voss, the aches were mine, and my body was mine. The fact that the welded soul could catalogue pain as low-priority parameters did not mean Elric had to.

LubDubdub...

My eyes widened as I realized that for the past few seconds, my heart had not been beating, and then I understood that this was the result of the core... my heart was different, changing into something else.

LubDubdub...

The recognition produced what the Hollow Avatar’s framework registered as,

unclassified emotional signature, source: integrated component

As for me, the beating of my heart gave me relief. It was now impossibly slow, about one beat for every ten seconds that passed, but it was still my heart.

And this heart still held all my love and my fears, no matter what it was changing into.

LubDubdub...

Yeah, I love you too, heart.

"Up, up, lazy cur. Elric, I say, wake up!"

No, I did not forget you, either.

∞

I could remain inside my tent massaging my ego and soul, but the eruption waited for no one, and I was eager to see what I had gained in the last loop because I had never gone so far.

Calling up my status screen, I read the first line that my sight always fell upon.

[Soul Condition: Welded]

I stopped.

Now, that did not look right.

There was no record or instance where the condition of a soul was welded.

The previous canonical states had been Stable, Strained, and one earlier loop’s brief flicker of Severed before Mortal Shell had recovered me.

Welded was a new state, and the new state had no entry in any text I had studied at the Academy.

I focused on this new state of my soul, and a description emerged.

[Soul Condition: Welded]

[Acquired by: complete combustion of the soul-substrate within a Broken-Celestial Hollow Avatar deployment]

[Effects:]

— Soul-substrate and Hollow Avatar substrate now operate as a single welded entity

— Standard Hollow Avatar deployment protocols deprecated; deployment now produces fusion rather than parallel-mode operation

— Pain registration may be suppressed at fused-entity discretion

— Sensory range expanded to include essence-tier perception at close proximity

— Permanent. Cannot be reversed without complete substrate destruction.

[Note:] The bearer should expect the welded entity’s framework to organise wakes before the Elric component’s framework can recover. This effect diminishes with practice but does not fully resolve.

I read it twice, and a small laugh emerged from my mouth, but if my mum heard it, she would know that a part of me was crying.

It seemed that I had finally reached the point where I could no longer return to who I was.

This loop and everything I had been experiencing, from the skills I had gained to the weird titles and all the deaths I had endured... There was still this small part of me you see... that small part that thought, when this was all over, I could return home, and no one would know what I had gone through.

Sure, I would have scars, but those would be cool scars, and as a mage, our scars fade.

The system was confirming what I had already understood. The welded soul was permanent.

I had been warned that for that, I needed to use Hollow Avatar at the fused state for four seconds or risk permanent assimilation, but in the face of the horned demon, I had disregarded this warning and pushed through.

I had killed that demon, but the price was a permanent change in my soul that could no longer be reset by the loop.

If I did not have the voice of Mel to wake me up at the start, then the part of me that was Elric would have sunk into the darkness of the hollow place, and although I would be alive, my soul would be dead.