I fell into my bed with a thump, twitching and groaning. The rebirth had been mostly just more of the same. The Falls had prepared me perfectly, albeit to a MUCH smaller scale. It was agonizing, drawn out, and now that I was finished, I hurt in ways I’d never even conceived of before. It felt like I had a sunburn on the surface of my soul.

Which, with a bit of flexing of my Eye of Revelation, I could see after having detached it in that temple. The experience showed me exactly where to look, and I could now view my pristinely clear and shiny Amethyst Soul, perfectly pristine and remade, if still very tender to even the slightest use.

Sadly, Archie’s Life Nova was functionally useless here, since the pain was FROM purification, and therefore impossible to cleanse, but I considered it a net win.

While I couldn’t use any abilities or do anything too strenuous, I could still make Skills, forms, or stances, and I decided that with my down time, I was going to work on an important project I’d been mulling over. Specifically, I was going to try to create my final form, the ninth form of the Goetia Staff art, after which I’d be stable enough to condense my Chronicle.

I was in a bit of a hurry, because I felt like I was getting close to doing it accidentally. I kept stumbling into enlightenment and nearly starting the condensation by mistake. I’d tried looking into if this happened normally, but hadn’t come up with any instances, and when I asked Zeke about it, he told me to go to hell and hung up. Regardless, I was on a clock, which meant I needed to finish my last form.

So I’d begun my search for what I needed. I considered more offense, more defense, other kinds of utility, but I decided the biggest benefit would be a higher base. All my forms worked multiplicatively, but they multiplied ME. That might seem like common sense, but thinking of it that way had given me a brilliant idea.

Forms, in a general sense, were partially inspired by some of the powerful multipliers I’d seen from people like Bethy. So what if I created a form that WAS a racial trait. Something completely new and unique to me. A form I could stack all my other forms on top of for a qualitative boost to their effect.

This project, I knew, would be incredibly complex. I’d need access to the details of a racial trait to use as a base, powerful modifiers, and a basic outline of what I wanted it to do.

So I went through my options. Vampire. Vampires were absurdly overpowered, but any vampire outside of the Lark family was due for a sudden and violent death, and since I didn’t fancy my chances against the strongest mortal in creation, I decided to let Bethy’s racial trait pass as a baseline. Unfortunate but necessary.

Next I considered Devils. That one was more plausible, but aside from the fact that it was a little obvious, it also felt…expected. My dad was a Devil, and even ignoring their increased say over my actions if I took that route, I’d be implying I wanted to be more like him, which I definitely didn’t.

That said, I wanted to stay on theme. I considered a few others. Djinn, werewolves, but they all felt too off brand. Then I stumbled on exactly what I wanted. Angels. Or rather, fallen angels. If I could get access to Serah and Holly’s racial trait, I could create my own version of it with a different alignment. Fallen angels were hellish, but also unique to me as far as I knew, at least in modern times.

I did some digging, and asked Callie to do a bit more (she was positively delirious after I gave her the rose) but neither of us heard anything about fallen angels, which was good enough for me.

I had eight wishes left for today, and having Callie give them to the twins was easy enough. It took a few tries for them to figure out how to store a charge of a racial trait, but they managed it through some clever wording, and each of them paid me four for some very valuable Skills they’d apparently been after for a while.

Which left me sitting on my bed, staring at my arm where a series of eight marks denoted the stored form changes.

I wanted to start immediately, but to maximize my usage I needed Dantalion, which meant my soul needed to recover. So I took a nap. The ambient life energy a the Heart didn’t fix my soul soreness, but it did rejuvenate my body and improve my sleep, so I woke up feeling refreshed and ready to take on the world.

Thinking about it, I hadn’t been damaged really, and it didn’t make sense for purification to have any long term negative effects. Once I was feeling up to it, I closed my eyes, triggering Serah’s stored form, and Dantalion at the same time.

Aiming that power inward was harder than expected, but it was doable. I pushed hard, focusing all my deductive and analytical ability into my body. Some of it didn’t do much, but the enhanced Eye of Revelation abilities definitely helped. I could SEE the makeup of the racial trait, the construction of an entity.

Stolen novel; please report.

It was staggering. The only thing I’d seen that was similarly complex was the wish power, though that was an order of magnitude more advanced. Bloodlines seemed to have a similar component to racial traits that made them inheritable, though I wasn’t even CLOSE to being able to replicate it.

The fact that it might be possible to BUILD inheritable Skills had never occurred to me. I suspected it had definitely occurred to my ancestor, but the wish power was his life’s work, and he most likely saw no need to recreate more inferior bloodlines after completing his magnum opus. Still, despite the complexity, the stored charge didn’t get me much. Only a single minute or so in that form.

Racial traits were advanced and powerful, and being able to store one at all was impressive. Still, a minute wasn’t much, and it would make this much harder. Taking out some paper, I flipped open my book, finding a table in a section near the back that had a series of complicated diagrams.

Much like blueprints for electronic devices contained shorthand physical symbols that let you sketch out a device in an understandable way, Skills also had a diagram language. It was incomplete and honestly more of a shorthand than anything, but it gave me SOME chance to record what I’d seen in a way that I could remind myself as I worked on the project.

It was my first time using the shorthand, and I wasn’t used to it. It took me about twenty minutes of rewriting and adjusting to get something vaguely resembling what I’d seen, and even that was pretty full of holes.

So I did it again. Another minute, but this time I started sketching DURING the observation, maximizing my time to copy things down.

After I wrung all of it out, I did it again, and then a fourth time. The second to last one I spent an hour adjusting and double checking before I did the final pass, and by the time I finished, I quickly realized…I didn’t know shit.

This was a massively complex and absurdly intricate project. My diagram didn’t include everything because I didn’t understand everything. I got maybe twenty percent of the entire trait, and even that I was shaky on. Like I’d copied the first layer of a multi layered concept, and without the rest of it there I didn’t have a shot at getting more.

But I didn’t stop, because I’d managed to gather SOMETHING. I had a stable, if diminished trait design, one that could, theoretically, make me stronger in certain ways, though the mechanism to actually induce a change escaped me.

In order for this to work, that was what I needed. I needed a base form to use as a foundation for all my others. Eventually, I was going to have to find a way to build it into my Skill itself, making the new changes permanent and leaving me in that form as a true baseline. But given the complexity of even making a temporary version, I was lightyears away from that.

Still, I had ideas. I started on Holly’s trait, doing the same thing as before. Learning more about Serah’s let me maximize my second diagram, getting more of what I needed out of it, and when I was finished, I compared the two.

While both Angels, Holly and Serah were not the same KIND of Angel. One had golden flames, and one had bronze. This implied racial traits could be customized, which I knew was true, but it also meant that the two traits had a common baseline. A shared foundation that appeared in both of them that showed me which parts were ‘Angel’ and which parts were more uniquely theirs.

That was what I’d been looking for. The thread that connected them, one I could copy wholesale (once I’d gotten the first scan done on Holly’s powers, I’d known where to focus Dantalion). I essentially just cut out an entire section of the two abilities to use as a base, and then started tinkering with grafting on new things.

It didn’t work. Making someone a new thing was fucking complicated. It wasn’t just “be this thing”, it was “be this thing at rest, this thing in motion, under these circumstances be this instead, or be this if that doesn’t work”. Racial traits were essentially complete redefinition of a being, and I was eons from managing that. I started stripping shit out, honestly leaning into my instincts to try to help.

Dantalion helped me explore, but I had to start over about a thousand times. Finally, after MUCH trial and error, I managed to create a sort of barebones starter, which essentially broke down to “be stronger, be faster, have wings, being definition: angel”. I noted that after I managed that, I was still looking at a house of cards.

Angels, as it turned out, needed some sort of core force, a baseline energy type to work from that defined what they were. Contacting Callie, I had her pass one of the reserve scrolls to my sister, and got a charge of something a little stronger.

Enshrining Darkness. The real one. The version that was inherited and not the Skill based knock off that Bishops used. To my surprise, it slotted right in without any trouble, and once it was there, the entire structure of the trait subtly shifted. An angel of conceptual rot and destruction.

Everything became a bit more streamlined, a bit more robust. I’d never seen that outside of a rank up, but something about Enshrining Darkness FIXED my form. In fact, it fixed things I didn’t even realize were wrong until I paid more attention.

Ignoring the weird phenomena surrounding godly abilities (thinking back Zagan had been way too overpowered) I tried for the finishing touch. Afterburner should have given me what I needed to make this a truly invincible form. Except… it didn’t work. Afterburner wouldn’t fit. I couldn’t get it into my ninth form anywhere. Maybe it was the lack of fire, or maybe Enshrining Darkness was just too powerful. I tried Touch of Tears, Consecration of Flame. Nothing.

Knowing I’d succeeded, possibly more than I could have possibly dreamed of, I finalized the form. I felt something change, a click as the Goetia Staff art shifted and became whole, something unbalanced inside me righting itself for the first time.

I stood up, walking into the bathroom, and stood in front of the mirror. “Goetia Staff Art Ninth Form:” I said calmly. “Sammael.” And then I changed. Wings unfurled from my back, massive and dark, made of feathers so black they seemed to consume the light. My eyes and hair both turned pitch black, and I felt strength fill me in a way I never had.

And unique among all my forms, I realized something else. This form didn’t strain my soul. Not any more than a normal Skill. This felt…natural. I wasn’t going to start on my Chronicle now, I’d wait until my next epiphany, but when it did, I’d be ready. I was finally complete.