Chapter 270: Revelations (I)

Althea’s POV

Back in the hall, a pin-drop silence permeated the whole space.

Althea stood with her sword drawn, the blade angled low, Order magic running through her entire being at the highest volume she could sustain without burning through her mana reserves entirely.

Her eyes moved between the three points in the hall that required watching — the God of Secrets standing near the center, composed and still in his dark tuxedo, Ailin against the far wall, whose stillness had stopped being Ailin’s stillness some time ago, and Vara, armless, propped against the corner wall with her eyes barely open. Even she could feel the tension in the air and naturally kept silent.

The atmosphere in the hall had changed the moment Finn stepped into the first corridor. It had been tense before that. Now it was on a whole other level. Everyone looked ready for a fight without blatantly showing they did.

Althea’s grip on her sword tightened slightly as she tried not to let her readiness show too much. For her, the one person that was the most dangerous threat was the God of Secrets. She didn’t have a frame of reference for what he was capable of at all, so she simply kept her order magic brimming and ready to go crazy at a moment’s notice.

That wasn’t to say Ailin wasn’t a threat too. In fact, Althea couldn’t bring herself to look directly at Ailin right now. She had been avoiding it since the change had deepened, since whatever was using Ailin as a vessel had settled fully into the foreground and pushed whatever remained of Ailin herself deep into the recess of her mind.

The feeling coming off of her was heavy and ancient and extremely dangerous, and Althea’s Order magic recoiled from it the way a hand recoiled from something too hot to touch without being told to.

She kept Ailin in her peripheral vision and kept her eyes on the God of Secrets.

The God in question hadn’t moved since Finn entered the corridor. He stood with his hands clasped and his expression composed and his eyes directed at the unnumbered corridor entrance.

Just as she was at him silently, she saw him perk up, right before she felt what had drawn his attention.

A vibration through the floor.

Faint. A tremor that moved through the stone and into the soles of her feet, more felt than heard. From below. From wherever the first corridor had led Finn to.

Althea’s heart rate climbed.

Just how much would he see in there?

Just how much would he remember?

She knew the answer, and that was why she hadn’t truly tried to stop him from entering that chamber, because she fully understood that stopping him would have been wrong. What was in that chamber… what he would learn in that chamber… was his right to learn.

He needs to know… She thought grimly, as her mind moved back to the start of it… of when she remembered. When she finally gained reprieve from the madness that was about to consume her. That was the honest description of it.

Even though it hadn’t looked that way at the time, she had been holding herself together with considerable effort, presenting a functioning front to Arros… or rather, to Finn, day after day, while underneath, a madness had been pulling at her constantly with no pause and no relief.

A memory. Or rather, the shape of a memory. The thing that Deacon had made her forget. Her mind could feel that gap there, that forced redirection that made her always feel like she could practically touch the memory, but every single time it was just out of her reach. The sensation people described when a word was at the tip of their tongue, that specific frustrated nearness, but constant.

Every hour of every day. Sleeping and waking and during conversations and during combat and during every quiet moment that should have been rest.

She had come close to breaking. And it wasn’t for Ailin who offered to help, she truly might’ve broken.

The memory of that evening was clear. She had been in her room in the house at the Sprawl, in one of the silent episodes when she felt like she’d almost remembered, but then was left hanging again.

Out of the blue, she’d heard Ailin’s voice from behind her. How the Mnemosyne had opened her door and stood there for who knows how long, Althea didn’t know. But the question that followed had been like salvation. The offer to give Althea her memory back. Her full memory. All of it.

Althea had looked at her for a long moment, feeling the ancient and alien quality in the air around her the way she felt it now, and had said yes.

Even now, standing in this hall with her sword drawn and the temple trembling below her feet, a part of her still wasn’t sure the yes had been right. Not because the knowledge was wrong to have, but because of what the knowledge was. What it meant to carry it and continue acting as though nothing had changed the whole time — that was Ailin’s condition afterall.

But Althea knew that the part of her second guessing her decision at the time, was simply the part of her that wanted to hide. The part that wanted everything to magically resolve on its own. In truth, she was very glad she’d taken that offer.

She had thought, before that evening, that she understood the world she lived in. She had been Thalia first, of royal bloodline, before her Transcendent nature manifested and changed the trajectory of everything. She had thought she understood history, the nature of Transcendents, the emergence of chaos breaches, the shape of how the world had come to be the way it was.

But it turned out none of that had been accurate.

The truth, as the returned memory showed her, was entirely different.

In the beginning, the world — her world. The world of Arcanists and Ossuarists, and Transcendents — had been an Arcanist’s world entirely. Mana was the only power that existed, worked and shaped by those whose souls had the capacity to perceive it. Ossuarists had likely always existed in potential; people whose souls were simply too dense to interact with mana’s frequency. But without soul masses yet existing in the world, they were indistinguishable from ordinary people.

That was until Transcendents began to appear.

Beings born at the precise threshold between the limits of mana perception and the beginning of what the world would eventually classify as Ossuarist. Rarest of the rare, a phenomenon of soul formation that had no precedent in the world’s history. Their souls didn’t just interact with mana the same way Arcanists did… they could do much more.

They could wield abstract concepts through it, giving form to ideas in ways that went deeper than elemental manipulation or body enhancement or artifact cultivation. They didn’t interfere with things. They gave things new rules.

This in turn changed mana itself, slowly. When Transcendents operated in the world and the mana around them began to carry the impression of abstract concepts being wielded through it, ordinary Arcanists casting their own magic found their consciousness increasingly interacting with a subtly different medium. A slow permeation across generations. And when those Arcanists died, what should have dissolved cleanly into mana remained — their consciousness entangled with it, producing chaotic masses that were part soul and part mana, neither fully one nor the other.

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