Chapter 272: Revelations (III)

Althea didn’t know every reason behind that requirement. She had her suspicions but she only knew what she had witnessed directly. Arros had run through many candidates over the years. Many souls pulled from different planes, each bearing Error authority driven by faith, each transplanted into their world through the same process. But something had gone wrong with every single one of them.

Some died in the transmigration itself. There were factors in moving a soul across planes that even Arros, at the height of his power, couldn’t fully account for.

Some survived the crossing but became so absorbed into their new life and new identity that whatever divine authority they had carried never developed at all. They lived their lives as Ossuarists and died fully assimilated into their new world, never remembering anything of who they truly were or where they were truly from.

Only one had come very close to achieving what Althea suspected to be Arros’ end goal. But still, something in the process had gone wrong at the critical stage, and Arros had triggered whatever he had embedded in the soul debt clause at the start and ended it himself.

That was all Arros did for years. Find a suitable soul. Transmigrate them. And then start to manipulate.

All the while, his end goal always remained obscured and left to imagination. But Althea, who had known him deeply for ages, had a theory. One that she could bet hit the nail right on the head.

From the beginning of the Grafting plan, she had noticed that Arros wasn’t simply transplanting souls and hoping for development. He was steering. The candidates moved through experiences that seemed, individually, like the natural consequences of being an Ossuarist in their world.

But Althea had known Arros long enough to recognize the fingerprints of his Error authority when it was working on something quietly in the background. The manipulation of logic. The nudging of circumstances. The way certain doors happened to close and certain others happened to open at exactly the right moments.

He had learned to deceive the memory of the world itself, convincing it of what was true and what wasn’t simply by weaving through the gaps. Events, people, even other Transcendents less powerful than him… their recollection of things could be rewritten subtly, without them knowing anything had been touched. He could sit behind the surface of a situation and make the world remember it differently, practically like the Truth Bearer’s authority, but operating on a level far beyond that, and with an entirely different mechanism.

She believed he had been doing this with every candidate. Growing them in a specific direction, from inside, riding the soul debt clause he embedded at the start to maintain a presence in their soul throughout the process.

And when the candidate reached the point he needed…?

Her theory, born from years of knowing Arros, was that he intended to superimpose himself. To graft his identity entirely onto the developed divine Error bearer, using the soul he had grown as a vessel to bypass every restriction their world placed on him. Then use his Error authority to convince the world — the world’s memory, the world’s understanding of what had always been — that he had always been this. That he had always carried divine Error authority. That there was no gap between what he was and what he had become, because the world would simply remember it as continuous.

And the soul he had used to get there would be gone…

She could be wrong. She had been wrong about Arros before, in both directions — underestimating what he was capable of and overestimating it in equal measure over the ages. She had no confirmation of any of this.

But now that she remembered everything, thinking back to how carefully Finn had been handled. The specific sequence of it all. The precision of what he had been put through compared to every prior candidate she had witnessed… This was not the same plan running again. This was the plan refined past every prior failure, built from everything those failures had taught, applied to the one soul Arros had clearly determined was the exception.

What level of patience was that, she thought. What kind of mind designed a person’s entire life as a mechanism, down to the last detail, and watched it run.

And then an even colder thought followed, the one she couldn’t shake loose.

What was the assurance that any of this was going wrong for him?

She had been reading the current situation as Finn finding out the truth and ruining Arros’ plans… becoming something Arros hadn’t planned for…

But Arros had accounted for every prior failure. Every dead end had become data. What if Finn walking into that chamber was exactly what was supposed to happen? What if the version of Finn that came out of it was precisely what Arros had been building toward all along, and Althea standing here feeling like she was on the right side of something was just another element in a design she couldn’t see the full edges of?

As the grim thought settled in her mind, the floor beneath her feet lurched, snapping her back into clarity.

The stone physically trembled, and chunks of the ceiling dropped into the hall in heavy pieces. The network of cracks across the walls had spread to every section of it now. The temple was giving way.

The God of Secrets looked at the corridor entrance. Whatever was left of his composure finished leaving his face, and what replaced it was the expression of someone who had watched a plan finish coming apart and was now down to the last available move.

His eyes landed on her.

She was ready. Order magic at full burn, sword up, every reserve feeding into it. She had been expecting this moment since Finn walked through that entrance.

But yet she still wasn’t ready for the speed.

He shed every restraint the vessel he was using as a body should have had and covered the hall in less than a blink, hand reaching for her throat before her sword arm had finished its first movement.

“Order Edict: Stillness!”

Somehow, the words came out before he reached her. The air locked. His hand stopped a finger’s width from her neck, frozen inside the field, and she threw herself backward out of his reach in the two seconds it held, sword coming up between them.

But it turned out she hadn’t needed to in the first place. In fact, the God of Secrets’ attack would never have reached her if her edict hadn’t been on time…

…Because out of nowhere, Ailin was suddenly between them.

Without the slightest sound. Without the slightest transition. As if she’d suddenly appeared like a blink, she was just there, and the presence radiating off her was fully forward now, no longer ambient and calm like before. That dangerous feeling Althea had sensed was now fully directed straight at the God of Secrets with a weight that made the air feel thick.

He jumped back multiple steps immediately and stared at what was looking at him through Ailin’s abyss black eyes with plain fear.

“This wasn’t the plan,” he said quickly, his pleasant voice stripped of all its ease. “Everything has come apart. The Order bearer needs to be removed now, before she stands alongside the Errant. That is the only logical move remaining.”

The voice from Ailin was layered. Many at once, distinct and harmonic, arriving together as one sound.

“We are watching.” The words filled the hall with a chilling resonance. “The situation has moved past what was projected. But the end is still vague… Where the end is still vague, We watch.”

As the voice dropped the last word, Ailin’s head turned toward the corridor entrance, peering into the darkness of the rubble, then with a ghost of a smile, the presence within Ailin left all at once. The weight in the air dropped, the ancient dangerous quality gone as completely as if a door had shut. Ailin’s body folded and Althea crossed the hall and caught her, lowering her down. She pressed two fingers to Ailin’s neck, hoping desperately for a pulse.

…Thankfully, there was one. It was thin and barely there… but it was present.

She kept her fingers there, as if that would prevent the pulse from leaving. The ceiling was dropping chunks now, steady and heavy. The hall was actively coming apart around them.

She heard the God of Secrets move again. But this time, even without activating her Order magic, she felt no fear.

Like the strike of a terrible God, something tore through the hall.

Black, green burning at its edges, moving so fast the air split into wide glitching tears along its path and closed behind it with visible effort. The God of Secrets threw himself hard to the side and kept moving, putting distance between himself and the path of the thing with the urgency of someone who understood exactly what they were clearing away from.

He only stopped when he reached the far wall, glancing down at his arm, where a glitching tear ate away at his hand, dismantling it into pixel-like tears that reality struggled to heal.

With a frown that had a hint of fright, embarrassment, and anger mixed together, he sliced off the hand cleanly, letting his blood spill freely, before clasping the stump and slowly looking up at the rubble of the corridor entrance.

From the rubble, a pair of green eyes opened in the darkness of the settling dust and locked onto the God of Secrets across the hall coldly, before a voice spoke, barely above a whisper…

“I told you you will bleed if you move.”

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