Mercy WIP - do not look

Please, please, please ignore this for now. I simply have it up here to book a space as it were so I don't have to type up the scene below when I have less patience.

THE SCENE
CAUTION SPOILERS FOR THE GATHERING STORM

The access key’s globe burst alight with a more brilliant colour, seeming crystalline. The light within was scarlet, the core brilliant and bright. As if someone had dropped a glowing rock into a pool of blood.
“I see a different answer to my problems,” Rand said, voice still almost a whisper. “Both times Callandor failed me, I was being reckless with my emotion. I allowed temper to drive me. I can’t kill in anger, Min. I have to keep that anger inside; I must channel it as I channel the One Power. Each death must be deliberate. Intentional.”
Min couldn’t speak. Couldn’t phrase her fears, couldn’t find the words to make him stop. His eyes remained in the darkness, somehow, despite the liquid light he held before him. That light hurled shadows away from his figure, as if he was the point of a silent explosion. Min turned to Nynaeve; the Aes Sedai watched with wide eyes, mouth slightly open. She couldn’t find words either.
Min turned back to Rand. When he’d been close to killing her with his own hand, she hadn’t feared him. But then, she’d known that it wasn’t Rand hurting her, but Semirhage.
But this Rand - hand aflame, eyes so intent yet dispassionate - terrified her.
“I’ve done it before,” he whispered. “I once said that I didn’t kill women, but that’s not true. I murdered a woman long before I faced Semirhage. Her name was Liah. I killed her in Shadar Logoth. I struck her down, and I called it mercy.”
He turned to the fortress palace below.
“Forgive me,” he said, but it didn’t seem directed at Min, “for calling this mercy as well.”
Something impossibly bright formed in the air before him, and Min cried out, backing away. The air itself seemed to warp, as if pulling away from Rand in fear. Dust blew from the ground in a circle around him, and the trees groaned, lit by the brilliant white light, the pine needles rattling like a hundred thousand insects scrambling over one another. Min could no longer make out Rand, only a blazing, brilliant, force of light. Pure power, gathered, making the hairs on her arms rise with the force of its nebulous energy. In that moment, she felt as if she could understand what the One Power was. It was there, before her, made incarnate in the man Rand al’Thor.
And then, with a sound like a sigh, he released it. A column of pure whiteness exploded from him and burned across the silent night sky, illuminating the trees below it in a wave. It moved quick as a snap of the fingers, striking the wall of the distant fortress. The stones came alight, as if they were breathing in the force of the energy. The entire fortress glowed, transforming into living light, an amazing, spectacular place of unadulterated energy. It was beautiful
And then it was gone. Burned from the landscape - and the Pattern - as if it had never been. The entire fortress, hundreds of feet of stone and everyone in it.
Something hit Min, something like a shocking wave in the air. It wasn’t a physical blast, and it didn’t make her stumble, but it twisted her insides about. The forest around them - still lit by the glowing access key in Rand’s hand - seemed to warp and shake. It was as if the world itself were groaning in agony.
It snapped back, but Min could still feel that tension. In that instant, it seemed as if the very substance of world had been near to breaking.