I got him and hopefully everyone is smarter than I was.... I can't believe I broke one of the pieces. That's the first time that's happened. Pretty stressful putting together a $1000 puzzle.
Really, most probably won't have an issue. When I look at the pieces now, it is plainly obvious. It really is one of those "spot the differences" game that little kids do and I failed. There was one hole that one of the metal rods goes in and the rods are differentiated by different shaped notches. This hole looked to have the same shaped notch and I missed that the piece I needed also had the upper part of the "black" part of the staff - huge difference. This is while I kept staring at the remaining pieces and wondering what they were there for. So stupid. I put the metal rod into the staff, it was a tight fit, I tried to back it out, it snapped apart and left the bottom of the metal rod in the staff hole. <sigh>
I hope I can get replacement parts.
I'm not the one to be the source of decent pics - this camera sucks and my lighting conditions currently aren't great. But, here are a couple of not-great pics just to give a general idea until someone posts some better ones.