Protecting me. Just like he’d promised.
Fifty-two percent. Fifty-one.
The corruption was fighting harder now, sensing its own dissolution. Shadow veins pulled tight and resisted burning, trying to drag me deeper into twisted energy that would corrupt my re-forming consciousness.
If I let them win, if I accepted the shadow energy, the transformation would complete faster with less pain and less cost.
But I would re-form as something corrupted. Something neither Sidney nor phoenix, but a hybrid creature twisted by the same darkness that had nearly destroyed the phoenix in the first place.
No, I told myself. Clean fire only. No corruption.
I pushed harder and burned away the shadow veins despite their resistance.
The clean fire consumed the corruption relentlessly. Each shadow vein that dissolved made the next one easier to burn. The pattern was becoming clearer now, the phoenix’s true essence emerging from under layers of twisted energy.
This was what the creature was supposed to be — natural death and rebirth unburdened by artificial interference.
Fifty percent.
Halfway through the remaining corruption…halfway to completing the transformation.
Halfway to discovering whether Sidney Lowell could survive this at all.
The warmth-pattern that represented Ben Sanders flared brighter, and for a moment, I experienced something that might have been love. Not the human emotion — that was gone. But recognition that this pattern mattered. That it represented something essential to whatever I was becoming.
Stay, I tried to send. Need anchor.
But again, the message came out as fire-patterns that only the phoenix understood.
Forty-nine percent. Forty-eight.
The pain was constant now, a background agony I could still ignore enough to function. My consciousness existed in a state of perpetual dissolution and reformation, burning away corruption while trying to hold on to enough pattern to separate when the transformation completed.
I was closer to phoenix than Sidney. Closer to fire than human. Closer to transcendent consciousness than individual identity.
And I was running out of time.
Through the portal network, I sensed instability in Silver Hollow’s dimensional barrier. The local portal was responding to the phoenix’s near-death, preparing to compensate for the creature’s absence. If the phoenix died before completing rebirth, if I failed to burn away the remaining corruption, then the portal would collapse.
My family would be trapped forever.
That knowledge existed as fact rather than emotion. I couldn’t feel the desperate urgency Sidney would have felt. Couldn’t access the fear and determination that had driven me to attempt this impossible merge.
I could only keep burning. Keep transforming.
Forty-seven percent. Forty-six.
The corruption was weakening. Each shadow vein that dissolved made the next one easier to burn. The clean fire was spreading, consuming twisted energy, re-forming it into proper patterns.
I was winning. Slowly. At terrible cost.
But winning.
Forty-five percent.
A distant explosion reached my fire-consciousness as something other than sound — energy patterns disrupting, dimensional barriers fluctuating. DAPI’s facility failing as Morse and Hargrove’s sabotage spread beyond the artificial portal.
Good. Let it all burn. Let Rosenthal’s weapon be destroyed completely, every piece of equipment reduced to slag, every bit of stolen phoenix essence returned to where it belonged.
