Chapter 279: The Return

Finn raised his head and met Her gaze.

She floated in the sky above him, looking down silently, expecting his response. The result of Her fight with the Radiant One was unknown. There were burn marks on Her body — long trailing scorch marks across Her skin where the Radiant One’s divine fire had burned Her in their exchange, evidence of just how far He had pushed His final offensive before the outcome was decided.

But aside from that, there was nothing else Finn could use to tell whether She had actually slain Him or whether He had simply escaped with what remained of Himself… Not that Finn particularly cared either way. The Radiant One’s fate was not what occupied his attention right now.

“I remember our deal,” he responded calmly, his voice crossing the distance between them and reaching Her clearly despite the ruined expanse of warped terrain and restless sea separating them. “You seek Eternity, do you not?” He paused but didn’t wait for Her response. “How do I find you when it is time?”

It was a genuinely valid question.

Finn knew that once he crossed back to his own timeline, trying to find a way back to this specific world would prove extremely difficult. Finding other worlds wasn’t hard for him now — he had demonstrated that just seconds ago when he created the chaos breach for Althea to cross.

But the only reason he had been able to do that at all was because the veils of both worlds happened to be in close proximity at this moment in time. These two worlds had been pressing against each other enough that the boundary between them was thin, and puncturing a thin boundary was a fundamentally different task from puncturing a boundary that was spread extremely far apart…

With how far into the future his own timeline was, and with everything he now knew — of Arros, of how the mechanics of plane travel actually worked, knowledge that had been sitting in Arros’ accumulated experience and was now fully accessible to him — he knew with certainty that the planes would drift considerably apart before the moment he would need to return here. The proximity that made a breach easy to create right now would not exist then.

His last question hung in the air as the Moon Mother simply looked at him from above with a serene expression, then smiled softly.

That simple smile affected the surroundings directly and immediately. The quality of the air shifted. The restless seas that had been churning against the edges of Finn’s field calmed to a flat stillness.

The scattered little swatches of deformed land that had been pulled and warped by the singularity of his invalidation spell seemed to settle, as if something fundamental about the state of the world in this region had just been soothed.

A heavy feeling of calmness poured over everything within range and saturated it completely, and it was the specific calmness that carried the Moon Mother’s particular Eldritch quality — the comfort and calm a mother’s embrace brought, yet tinged with a devious guile behind it.

If not for the level of power Finn was currently operating at, the full weight of his soul masses and his Error authority, even he would have succumbed to it immediately without realizing he was succumbing. He would have simply felt calm and not questioned why.

But he didn’t. He simply watched as the Moon Mother responded.

“If you can truly find Eternity,” She said, Her voice carrying the same calmness as Her smile, “then crossing planes, no matter how vastly spread apart, would be as easy as breathing.”

Another person might have been curious about what Eternity was after that response. But Finn only nodded slightly and took it in stride, the new depth in him absorbing it the way it had absorbed everything since the chamber — without urgency, without surprise.

“Then I will leave now.”

The green in his eyes grew brighter as he said it, his Error vision running at full capacity, the luminous glow of it casting faint light on the warped earth at his feet. From the looks of things, returning to his own timeline seemed to take less effort than force-creating a chaos breach in a world with no framework to bear one.

He didn’t even make use of Spell Amplification. All he did was use his Error vision to directly observe the intricacies of reality around him, reading it at the deepest level his vision could reach, until he found what he was looking for.

The tether.

The one Madoc had placed in his soul before he traveled back. It was there, exactly where it had always been, a thin line of intentionality running through the fabric of reality toward a specific point in time that was his.

He stretched his hand forward and pinched the air carefully, as if pulling on the very thread of reality itself, tugging on the tether the way one tugged on something fragile that needed to be pulled with precision rather than force.

The moment he applied that first pull, the look on his face changed.

It became deadly serious in an instant, the focused calm he had worn since the chamber morphed into a harder and more terse expression. And it wasn’t only him. Even the Moon Mother floating above him went extremely still. She watched with a quiet attention as a change suddenly occurred within Finn’s soul.

A separation began.

It could be felt immediately by every being for miles with a soul dense enough to perceive the supernatural. The Moon Mother felt it. The Incarnate, the Moon Goddesses and the remaining Sun Gods still locked in their distant fights miles away. All of them paused simultaneously as the air became charged with a tension that had no source in the physical world.

Reality itself seemed to focus on the space that Finn… or rather, Arros’ body, occupied. An incongruity was occurring in real time. As Finn’s soul began to be pulled toward the future, toward the body and the time that were his, two versions of Error occupied the same space for the first time. Not one hiding within the other, as they had been since the beginning of this entire sequence, but separate from each other. Two distinct Error entities, equally present, equally real, equally claiming the same authority within the same plane at the same moment in time.

It was a logical fallacy that reality itself was constitutionally incapable of tolerating.

Two bearers of the same authority. The same plane. The same moment. Both with equal claim. The universe had exactly one response to that situation and it did not negotiate or deliberate before initiating it.

The world began to reject them both.

The full force of existence itself moved against both of them equally, the correction absolute and indiscriminate, with no awareness of the individuals it was acting on and no interest in the distinction between them. It simply identified the incongruity and moved to nullify it. It would continue nullifying until the incongruity was resolved, one way or another.

For Finn, it felt like his soul was being fed through a grinder.

There was no other description that came close. Excruciating pain tore through his very being with an intensity that made every experience of physical pain he had ever had across all his lifetimes feel like a memory.

All of his authority was irrelevant. All of his newly consolidated power, everything he had gained from the soul masses, everything he had unlocked and refined and wielded against the Radiant One was entirely useless. The force acting on him now operated on a level that made the concept of power simply not applicable. Power was a tool that operated within the rules of existence. What was attacking him now was the mechanism that enforced the rules themselves.

Dao.

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