Talk:The Elementalists, Book 2 Choices/@comment-38804052-20190413152008/@comment-3452092-20190413153443

Maybe it's not an easy process to access her full powers in human form and she was unable to defeat him without them. It doesn't seem unlikely that she couldn't just turn back to her source form at will and had to go through some sort of process to get there. That would be my guess.