Sixty-nine percent.
Through our merged consciousness, I sensed movement in the portal network. Energy was shifting, the flow changing direction. For the first time since Rosenthal had activated her artificial gate, power was moving back toward the natural sites instead of being drained away.
Something had changed. Something significant.
The phoenix-part-of-me recognized the pattern immediately. The artificial portal was failing. The wound in the network was closing.
Rebecca Morse and Eric Hargrove had succeeded. They’d destroyed Rosenthal’s weapon.
The moment of failure crackled through the network. The artificial portal that had been draining energy from hundreds of supernatural sites suddenly ceased. The flow reversed, and the stolen phoenix essence began streaming back to its natural source.
Through me…through the merge.
Clean phoenix fire that had been trapped in DAPI’s machinery suddenly returned and flooded through our merged consciousness, amplifying everything I was feeling.
The pain became transcendent, absolute and all-consuming.
But so did the cleansing.
Sixty-eight percent. Sixty-seven. Sixty-six.
The corruption burned away faster now, the returning essence providing fuel for the transformation. Shadow veins dissolved under the onslaught of clean fire, their twisted energy unable to withstand the purifying flood.
Each percentage point of corruption that burned away felt like dying and being reborn simultaneously. The shadow energy resisted and clung to the phoenix’s essence, but the clean fire was stronger. It consumed the corruption, transformed it, re-formed it into proper patterns.
I was burning alive from the inside out. Re-forming even as I dissolved. Dying and being reborn in the same eternal moment.
My human consciousness screamed. My phoenix consciousness sang. And somewhere between those two extremes, something new was forming.
Not Sidney. Not phoenix. Something that had been both and was becoming neither.
Sixty-five percent. Sixty-four.
The memories I’d lost didn’t return. The emotional connections that had burned away stayed ash. But new patterns were forming in their place — phoenix-memories that predated human civilization, understanding of dimensional energy that transcended scientific knowledge, awareness of the portal network that extended across the entire planet.
I was becoming something that had never existed before, a hybrid entity with fragments of human consciousness embedded in phoenix awareness.
The question was whether enough Sidney would remain to matter when the transformation was finally complete.
Through the phoenix’s ancient memories, I experienced rebirth cycles stretching back centuries. I saw the creature die and re-form countless times, each transformation perfect and clean and natural. I saw guardians through the generations anchoring those rebirths and maintaining the connection between phoenix and portal.
But none of those guardians had merged as completely as I had. None of them had attempted to become the phoenix rather than just guide it.
And I had no way of knowing whether it would work.
Sixty-three percent. Sixty-two.
Ben’s electromagnetic signature pulsed nearby, and for a moment, I experienced something that felt almost like recognition. Not love, exactly, because the emotional content was gone. But awareness that this pattern was important, that it represented something I needed to hold on to.
Anchor. Partner. Reason to separate.
If I could hold on to that understanding, if I could remember that the warmth-pattern represented something worth returning to, then maybe I could separate when the rebirth was completed. Maybe I could re-form as something that remembered being Sidney, even if it wasn’t quite Sidney anymore.
It was a small hope, thin and fragile. But it was all I had.
I focused on the warmth-pattern and studied it with my fire-consciousness. It had a particular frequency, a specific resonance that my phoenix-sense recognized as compatible with my own signature. The pattern was stable despite the fear it carried within, grounded in ways that my fragmenting consciousness wasn’t.
This was my anchor. The thing that would help me remember I was supposed to be separate from the phoenix when the transformation was completed.
