Magical Soul Parade

Chapter 266: Convergence of Divergence (II)

The slideshow moved on before he could stay with it.

Back through the future timeline. The Husk leader and its pale white hollow form, the wrongness of it seemed much less threatening, but still enough that he could still tell that whatever it was, was truly an abomination.

The memory moved on to Tron’s death. To their entry into the world tear. To the Soul Sanctum. Priest, the truth fragment holder.

To Xanth. The Ferropteryx. To Aethelos and the Queen Sovereign. The Undying Flames. Seeing Preceptor Elias the first time.

Then Egon. The spatial attack tearing the world apart around him and Althea and Micah and the female Caretaker.

Their first encounter with Egon in that temple, both of them significantly under-equipped for what they’d walked into, surviving on a combination of capability and luck and the specific stubbornness that had always been the thing Finn ran on when everything more sophisticated failed. His first chaos breach. The Seneschal Ossuarist School and the strange compressed intensity of that period.

Then the soul debt state.

He looked at it from outside and felt retrospective vertigo settle over him. The absolute silence of it. The total sensory absence at the time, nothing coming in from the external world, nothing to orient by, nothing to push against. Just his own thoughts in a void for a duration that still didn’t have an accurate number attached to it, and yet he had survived through it somehow.

Looking at the memory from outside now, with the clarity this tomb was offering him, he genuinely could not reconstruct the mechanism of how he had done it. Many people had broken under far less than that, yet something in him had simply refused to break.

The slideshow continued to move backwards, until finally, it reached the beginning...

The dark space. The spotlight. The figure already waiting, already moving toward him before he was fully conscious of being anywhere at all.

From outside, the fight looked different than it had felt from inside. From inside it had been pure animal survival without thought or technique. He had simply been moving from pure instinct and will to survive.

But now, seeing it from the outside, he watched two identical figures struggle in the dark, one choking and one being choked, both bleeding early, both moving with the desperate gracelessness of people with no fighting background trying to kill each other in the most primal possible way because one of them had to.

He watched himself find the eyes. Watched the other him recoil and roll and scream in a way that was deeply uncomfortable to hear. Watched himself stand on legs that had no business holding weight and close the distance anyway.

He watched the unsightly sight that followed. As he and his replica rolled on the floor in the spotlight, moving and coiling around each other purely with the intent to kill.

He watched himself roll off the replica’s body. Watched the replica’s final spasms... the hands reaching out and finding nothing, the chest heaving one last time, the specific stillness that followed. Watched his own face cycle through the expression he remembered from inside, that particular look of someone who had just done something irreversible and was standing in the new reality of it, not yet knowing what to do with their hands.

Then the replica’s form began to disperse like dust.

This part, he didn’t remember. But he knew this was where he was awakening in the carriage.

In seconds, his form was entirely gone, and so was the replicas’.

But Finn was still here. It was just him in the memory now, observing the silent darkness and the spotlight.

His already tense consciousness, put on edge from watching such a life and death fight, was even more frazzled, expecting something to happen. Something that would explain what had spurred this entire thing in the first place.

His senses spread out like a wave, waiting, feeling the seconds pass by in a crawl...

And then suddenly, something weird entered his perception.

There, in the darkness, right beyond the spotlight’s edge directly opposite him, was a presence.

It jarred his senses immediately he spotted it, giving him a sense of deja vu like he might’ve felt that same presence before. Perhaps during his fight here the first time...? Something in the dark at the edge of that space, watching the struggle play out, waiting with the patience of something that had already known the outcome and was simply observing the form of it.

With a mad fury, he reached for the presence immediately. All the accumulated power and soul density he’d gained directed at that single point in the darkness, his mind moving toward it with everything he had, trying to reach and identify and understand what had been sitting in the dark of that beginning moment, watching him.

The presence didn’t move, as if in fear, or maybe even amusement. But at the microsecond Finn was about to latch onto it... the memory slideshow lurched forward and expelled him.

A roar of hot rage and utter frustration tore through his throat viscerally. His hands closed into fists and his jaw set while the anger ran through him at full intensity, because he had been right there. Right at the threshold of discovering what was very likely a crucial revelation that would shed light on why and how he was here in the first place.

He opened his eyes ready to demand an answer from whatever was listening in this corridor.

And stopped.

Because he wasn’t in the corridor like he expected... but rather, he was sitting in the university library right where he’d died and crossed over.

He wasn’t out of the memory at all.

What the hell’s going on? Finn was flabbergasted. Wasn’t the dark space the start to his story as the Errant? Wasn’t that where it all began?

His mind was in a jumble, first, because of the anger he was just coming down from, and now because of the fact that he was back on Earth — the shock of that, seeing the familiar modern library and school again, had a significant effect on his mind — and also because for as long as he had been in his new world, he’d always thought the fight in the dark space was the beginning of his troubles...

But yet, the memory was still sliding further back.

He watched as he felt the weird headaches that led to his death. He watched as he met his friend, Rick, who was also a university student like him.

Then the slideshow started to pick up speed. Showing his entry into university, his high school days, his weirdness for liking history, Gods and ancient civilizations, his childhood days, his days as an infant...

And then, to Finn’s absolute surprise... His days inside a warm, dark red enclosure that he immediately knew was his mother’s womb. In fact, seeing it triggered the memory in his mind, like a part of himself that had been sealed away had returned to him.

And then, the slideshow went even further back, showing different lives that slowly came back to him, spanning across several ages, from the industrial age to the renaissance, the medieval era, and back to the dawn of ancient civilizations... to a time that looked nothing like modern Earth at all... And there, the slideshow finally slowed.