Magical Soul Parade - Chapter 263: Another Deity

Chapter 263: Another Deity

Back in the temple…

Finn had just stepped out of the corridor and into the central hall when a feeling suddenly hit him. An intense thrumming deep in his chest that had nothing to do with the soul masses he’d integrated. His sealed divinity, compressed and locked away for lore-building, pressed against its own boundaries with a force he hadn’t felt before. The temple’s suppression kept it from breaking through, but the pressure was significant. Something outside had grown strong enough that even here, insulated by the Fog and the temple’s own nature, he could feel it straining toward him.

Jon…? His faith? No… This is too much for one person. Has he brought others into the fold? Finn stood still and analyzed it, before suddenly, something else surfaced underneath the straining pressure of his divinity.

A defining moment.

The mechanism of his transmigration into this body. The thread that connected him between this moment and the future timeline he’d come from. The same thing Madoc had put in place as a clutch to free himself and return back to the present.

He could see it now. As clear as day.

It was completely visible, running out of him at an angle that had no physical direction, connecting his present soul to the anchor point in the future where Madoc was. Not only that, he could also read exactly what it was, understand its full structure, trace every component of how it had been built and what held it together…

And beyond reading it, he could interact with it. Use it, or sever it, or reshape it entirely. He could create entirely new threads of his own, bypassing Madoc’s work and writing his own relationship to causality without using any architecture someone else had built.

He looked at it for a long time.

Somewhere on the other end of that thread was a world, a timeline, a version of himself that had once been his true reality… Home, even.

But right now, he felt nothing of such towards it. In fact he felt nothing at all. To him it was just another place to go.

Gone was the Finn that had craved so much to return. He wasn’t the same person who had arrived here two years ago, still operating reactively, still being led by the nose by circumstances and other people’s designs, surviving on cleverness because he hadn’t had anything else.

That person would have stared at this thread and felt joyous at the thought of home it connected to, or the injustice of being taken without consent, or the urgency of understanding what it meant for his future.

Finn looked at it and felt none of those things.

He was the Errant. And the Errant didn’t react to what other people had built. He decided what he was going to do with it, in his own time, on his own terms. The thread would be there when he chose to address it. If he ever chose to address it.

He let his awareness pull back from it, and his eyes opened in the physical space of the central hall.

His eyes were glowing green. He could tell from the quality of light hitting the stone in front of him. His Error vision had surfaced entirely on its own now, thoroughly a part of him, passively operating at a level he would never have been able to maintain just a few weeks back.

Wordlessly, he stretched forth his hand and the Errant’s sword materialized in his palm, then in a seemingly random move, his gaze moved to a specific point in the hall. A point in the empty air near the center of the circular space, slightly above eye level.

He stared at it patiently, almost as if he was looking at something only he could see.

Not long after, the air at that point changed. A figure assembled itself from nothing. A tall man in a dark tuxedo, well-fitted, immaculate, with the bearing of someone who had spent a very long time being precisely what he chose to be in any given moment and had gotten extraordinarily good at it. He looked prim. Simple, even, if you didn’t know what you were looking at.

He looked at Finn and nodded in formal acknowledgement.

“God of Secrets,” Finn greeted plainly.

Immediately, a sharp intake of breath was heard from the side. Vara had a look of utter shock at Finn’s statement. How exactly Finn had known the identity of the man before him remained a mystery, but she knew without a doubt that he couldn’t be wrong. That was most definitely the ever elusive God of Secrets.

Althea also stiffened slightly at Finn’s introduction, though hers was more in recollection of the elusive God tied to the betrayal by their Transcendent comrades. That, and something else…

She only observed him more carefully and calculating. A trace of wariness on her face.

The sharp intake of breath from Vara made the God of Secrets turn his gaze from Finn and move to the others in the room, an easy air about him as he did.

“Thalia,” he said pleasantly, addressing Althea by her true name. “The Order bearer. Such a powerful and fearsome authority…” His tone was conversational, genuine interest underneath it. Then it turned serious, just slightly, at the end of his next sentence. “It’s a shame you have no source to fuel that authority. But I guess it’s good all the same. With one, I might have had to kill you at some point.”

Althea looked at him with cold eyes and said nothing.

His gaze moved to Vara.

“And Vara Hasteinn,” he said, speaking a name never heard before. “Great-granddaughter of Hasteinn the outcast. Half-breed of the Anaelle race, through his father’s line.” He paused, studying her face. “You know what the Anaelle did to him. What they called him. The specific cruelty of people who are natural-born distrustful schemers. Practically the most distasteful of the myriad races I know of…”

He paused and frowned slightly. “Why would you want the acknowledgement of people like that so desperately?”

He looked at her for a moment, genuinely curious to see what her answer would be.

But after staring at her for some seconds and seeing the look behind her eyes, he got his answer and his expression flickered with something like disappointment. He looked like he had considered multiple possible explanations to her motive, only to find that the correct one was the least interesting.

“You want them to acknowledge you just to shame their scorn,” he said. “You want them to recognize you so you can throw that recognition back in their faces.” He glanced away briefly. “I had thought there must be another reason. I considered it at length. But I should have known… it’s always the petty things that hold the strong-willed like you.”

Vara didn’t respond. Her clenched jaw gave away the fact that the God of Secrets was exact on point and had read her like a book.

The God of Secrets’ gaze moved to Ailin. He looked at her for a moment, then nodded once, as he had nodded at Finn — acknowledgment between things that understood each other’s nature. He didn’t speak to her.

Then he turned back to Finn.

Finn was watching him with the unhurried attention of someone with no particular feeling about what they were looking at. The Errant sword hung at his side, its green light pulsing slowly, the air around it glitching in small irregular bursts that healed themselves a moment later.

The God of Secrets cleared his throat, then reached into his breast pocket and produced something that looked like a slim notebook and a pen. He opened it and began writing as he spoke, his eyes staying on Finn.

“The Errant is very strong now,” he said. “Strong enough that I think it would be better for everyone… and I do mean everyone, not just the parties with obvious interests, if the Errant didn’t become any stronger.”

Finn looked at him and let out a weary sigh. “I have no time for coded language,” he said. “Especially from a grand schemer like you. Say what you mean or don’t speak.”

The God of Secrets paused his writing. Then he closed the notebook and returned it to his breast pocket, and for the first time the pleasantness became something more direct.

“If you claim all the remaining soul masses,” he said, “you will never reach Eternity.”