Chapter 282: Back To The Future (II)

The presence entered Finn’s perception with the force of a physical impact. He was right there, next to Finn, traveling right alongside him, latched on by the inextricable logic of soul debt.

He was alive. He was well and he was following Finn back to the future.

The battle wasn’t over. The gamble hadn’t killed him.

But then Finn felt it. He pushed past the initial shock of Arros’s survival and delved into the quality of the presence. Because he had burned those soul masses, because he had prolonged the nullification, he had stripped away Arros’s primary defenses. The veil was thin enough for Finn to sense the state of this monster…

And what Finn sensed… was glee…

Arros was gleeful.

It was a cold, alien glee that sent a shiver through Finn’s transient consciousness. Even though he had nearly died, even though he knew Finn was now fully aware of his existence and would stop at nothing to excise him, Arros was radiating a sense of profound, twisted satisfaction. It was the glee of a master who had watched his pupil perform a difficult trick… a calm, crazy delight that ignored the pain of the process.

To Arros, this was all part of the theatre. Finn wasn’t his first rodeo. He had lived within many souls for generations, watching every heartbeat, every failure, and every secret triumph. He had manipulated the background of many Error bearers’s lives with the patience of a stone. A person capable of such a feat was not subject to normal psychological stresses like fear or rage…

But Finn was no pushover either. He was the Errant who had survived the hunt of Gods across eons. He didn’t let Arros’s glee intimidate him. Instead, he pushed deeper, using the brief second of connection to search for the truth behind the mask.

And there, beneath the glee, he found it.

Uneasiness.

Arros was unsettled. The glee was genuine, yes, but it was also a shield. For the first time in his long, parasitic existence, it seemed the “resource” he was farming had turned into something he couldn’t fully predict. The burning of the soul masses he’d planted had created a deviation in the path Arros had laid out.

He’s been weakened significantly, Finn realized with a surge of grim triumph.

The glee was the reaction of a madman, but the uneasiness was the reaction of a tactician who had lost control of the board. Arros had been hurt. The Great Dao had carved pieces out of him that he couldn’t easily replace.

Before Finn could probe further, the mechanism of the graft took hold. The veil snapped shut, and the presence of Arros was once again submerged into the deep, unreachable layers of Finn’s subconscious. The “silence” returned, but it was a different silence now — a heavy, expectant quiet between two combatants who had finally seen each other’s faces.

Then came the final lurch.

Finn felt the sudden, claustrophobic pressure of matter. His soul slammed into his body with a force that made his vision swim with static. The transition from the infinite expanse of the time-stream to the narrow confines of a physical form was a traumatic shock to his system.

Utter blackness filled his perception. He felt heavy, his limbs like lead, his lungs burning with the sudden requirement for oxygen. Slowly, the sensory data began to trickle in. The feel of cold stone against his body. The hard, flat surface beneath his back.

His physical senses were returning, his consciousness settling into the familiar confines of his own body…

Finnegan Slade was back.

“…Finn?”

A familiar voice spoke, yet the sound was like it was coming from the other side of a thick wall.

It was Madoc… The Anaelle… The bearer of the space fragment who had initiated this entire journey.

Finn’s eyes cracked open slowly. The light was dim, flickering with a strange, dying energy. He was lying on the floor of Madoc’s Sanctum, the ceiling above him still decorated with the illusion of stars. But something was wrong. The little points of light looked exhausted, their glow reduced to faint, pathetic smudges against the dark.

He turned his head with a slow, grinding effort and saw Madoc.

The Anaelle was on his knees a few feet away. His appearance was shocking. The once-stately man looked as though he had aged centuries in the span of hours.

His white, braided hair was scattered and matted with sweat, his white fur-coated body was drenched, looking clumped and bedraggled. He was trembling, his chest heaving with a weariness that suggested he was at the absolute brink of death.

But his eyes… his eyes were still burning with a sharp, terrifying vigor. They were locked onto Finn, boring into him with intensity. He was searching for something. He was trying to decipher the nature of the soul that had just inhabited the shell in front of him.

Finn held the gaze, refusing to look away. He sat up slowly, his joints popping with a series of loud, sharp sounds as he let out a long, shaky breath.

“My body is so weak…” Finn murmured, his voice sounding raspy and foreign to his own ears. “How long was I out?”

Madoc didn’t respond. He didn’t even blink. He simply watched with an unreadable expression as Finn stood up.

He watched Finn as he clenched his fists, feeling the strength of his muscles. As Finn twirled his arms, shaking off the deadness and the stiff, cold lethargy that had settled into his marrow. As Finn rolled his neck, listening to the vertebrae crack…

Finn’s soul was re-adapting to his body with a speed that was fundamentally impossible. The disorientation that should have lasted for days — the “soul-lag” of re-entering a body after traveling across time — was being processed and discarded in seconds.

Within less than a minute, the grogginess was gone. Finn stood tall, his posture perfect, his eyes clear and focused. He looked fit as a fiddle, as if he had never left the room.

Finally, Madoc spoke. His voice was a dry, hollow rasp.

“…So you did not make it.”

The Anaelle rose slowly. His bones creaked and popped with a sound like dry wood snapping. He looked as though he had been in that slumped, kneeling position for an eternity.

“My guts tell me one thing,” Madoc continued, his voice gaining a cold, sharp edge. “They tell me that Finn is still Finn. They tell me that the soul I sent out is the one that returned. They tell me no one has taken over your body.”

He took a step toward Finn, his eyes narrowing.

“I trust my guts… usually. But there are times when even the guts are fooled by a superior performance. In moments like those… one must abandon instinct and rely on logic. One must be decisive.”

Madoc’s spatial energy began to hum, a low, vibrating growl that made the air in the Sanctum feel pressurized.

“I have never moved someone across time before,” Madoc said, his voice turning icy. “But I know the mechanics of the soul. No one… absolutelyno one… can travel across time, inhabit another’s body, and experience a different life for as long as you have, and then come out this calmly.”

He pointed a clawed finger at Finn.

“The disorientation of re-adaptation should have taken you weeks. Months, perhaps, given the depth of your immersion. The soul must re-learn the body’s specific resonance. It must re-calibrate every nerve ending, every metabolic trigger. It is a slow, agonizing process of re-discovery.”

Madoc’s eyes flashed with a sudden, violent surge of energy.

“And yet, you shrug it off in a minute? You stand there as if you just stepped out of a bath? That is not the sign of a soul returning to its home. That is the sign of a master inhabitant. A being so used to shifting between vessels that the transition is trivial.”

The air around Madoc began to warp. Chaotic distortions rippled off his fur, tearing small, jagged holes in the fabric of the Sanctum’s reality.

“I made you a promise before you left,” Madoc said, his voice now a roar of spatial static. “That if it wasn’t you who came back… that if some other entity had somehow hijacked your body, I would end you immediately. That I would not hesitate to destroy the vessel to kill the intruder…”

Finn watched him silently. He didn’t move to defend himself. He didn’t try to explain. He simply held Madoc’s gaze, a small, unreadable smile beginning to crack the corners of his mouth.

Madoc didn’t wait for a response.

The Anaelle flickered out of view, and in the same heartbeat, the space next to Finn imploded.

Madoc reappeared with terrifying speed, his hand coated in a roiling mass of chaotic distortions, thrusting it directly toward Finn’s chest with the intent to unmake him where he stood!

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