It didn't matter that Ren recognized the feeling. Recognition and resistance were not the same thing.
He reached for Liora.
The memory of her fire, that sensation that burned in the painful but correct way, that pushed back against the wrong kind of feeling and replaced it with the right kind.
But this time the quantity was different.
A fierce pain arrived before he had time to prepare for it.
Not the pain of Liora's spiritual fire, which was clean even when it was intense. This was the pain of an absurd quantity of corruption being resisted without a channel wide enough to expel it, accumulating in the same nodes he had been disrupting so calmly just minutes ago, backing up against the resistance his body was trying to maintain, finding nowhere to go and pressing harder in every direction.
Ren screamed.
