well, you'd seen it. you'd watched it pour from you, scouring your foes from whatever plane of existence they had previously inhabited.
but you'd never felt it—never understood it in a true, visceral way. not until the fire that burned inside you now.
your sisters had warned you this day would come. it'd been a few weeks since your fall. long enough to lose your resilience, but not long enough to lose your light. you could feel it now. like a flame. like a reactor. like a supernova. beautiful and terrible—as you'd been described before.
you wished you could channel it, like you would have. you wished you could open up your throat and let it pour out from you, scalding your throat on the way up—but at least it would be out. you wished you could claw your way through your get and tear it from your soul.
but you couldn't. it didn't work that way anymore. you didn't have that control. it was yours, yes, but yours in the same way that—to your dismay—you had learned that your body was, now. your tool, yes, but also your responsibility. something that you carried as it carried you.
so you sat with your eldest sister as she cared for you—taught you how to care for yourself, as she had every day since your fall. you learned to breath. you learned how to pay attention, and when not to. you learned to channel it—not like a weapon, but like blood. it was so messy.
you could feel the burns inside you. in your body. upon your soul. you catalogued them, you accepted them, you put them away. you opened them back up, and began the process again, and again, and again. your sister promised you this would pass. you begged yourself to believe her.
you fought like this for some time—one of many problems, in those weeks and months. one took your attention from the other. this was for better and for ill. mostly it just was. you fought, and fought, and fought. at some point, you learned to stop fighting. you learned to feel the last sparks of your light in you as unavoidable company, not a misbehaving familiar. you learned, even, to appreciate that company, in the same way you might the friend of a friend who you didn't much like.
and eventually, you thought back to what your sister had told you, and you realized she had lied, in pursuit of a greater truth.
it would never truly pass. the burns, that was. you would feel them on your soul forever. you would feel them when you coughed, when you swallowed, when your body otherwise betrayed you.
what would pass was the denial. the rage with which you could not accept what was happening.
you learned to identify that particular pain. a different affliction of the soul. you thought it an exaggeration to say that it was worse than the burns—but unlike them, it was malleable. it could be fought, by refusing to fight it. it could change. that, you decided, was enough.
NEVER/END