Magical Soul Parade-Chapter 269: Convergence of Divergence (V)

Finn watched the aftermath roll through the slideshow in compressed flashes. Gods turned on each other within weeks of the Errant’s disappearance, the shock of what they had witnessed spurred a realization that gnawed at their minds, nearly driving them to madness from frenzy.

Faith and authority were separable...

A God could exist and wield power independent of lore and believers. That simple fact had cracked something fundamental in the assumptions they had all built their existence around.

Because every God understood immediately what that meant for them.

Their lore gave them unimaginable power, yes. But it was this same lore that also confined them. Thor could not act outside the nature of Thor — the thunder, the protection, the specific and well-defined personality that centuries of belief had crystallized around him. To step outside it was to destabilize the very faith sustaining him.

Odin could not abandon wisdom, could not be seen to act foolishly, could not show cowardice, because the lore that made Odin powerful also demanded that Odin remain Odin in every action and decision. The faith was a chain as much as it was a throne. Every God sat on both simultaneously and had always accepted this as the fixed condition of being divine.

But the Errant had broken that law. He has shown that it wasn’t a truth.

He had severed himself from his lore entirely and retained his authority. The implications of that were not subtle. If it was possible — if there was a mechanism by which a God could dissolve the binding of their lore without collapsing their authority, without ceasing to exist, without the slow agonizing diminishment that claimed every God who lost their believers — then the chains were not fixed. They were a problem to be solved. And there was not a single God in the pantheon who, upon understanding this, didn’t immediately want that solution for themselves.

The wars that followed were vicious.

Pantheons that had maintained careful diplomatic arrangements for centuries turned on each other over the possibility that one might have information about what the Errant had done. Coordinated attacks on entire divine factions on the suspicion that they were harboring the Errant or had made contact with him or had extracted from him the secret of how the separation worked.

Hidden powers that had maintained obscurity for eons surfaced to assert themselves in the chaos. The divine order of Earth, which had been stable for so long that its stability felt like a law of nature, fractured into open conflict across multiple pantheons simultaneously.

And the soul they were all looking for had already been born again on the other side of the world, living in a farming village, with no memory of any of it.

Phineas had planned the seal carefully before entering the cycle. A complete suppression of the authority and the memory both, deep enough that even his own consciousness in the new life would find no trace of either.

He already knew beforehand that the divine order would be frantic and chaotic in the immediate centuries. Then the search would narrow and systematize as the initial frenzy settled. Then, over the ages, the conditions of the world would shift. The ambient divinity would reduce. The old Gods would fade or transform or die. New narratives would rise that had nothing to do with the pantheons that had organized against him. And when the world had changed enough that the divine order hunting him was a fraction of what it had been, he would return.

Thousands of years, if necessary.

He had already demonstrated he could survive thousands of years.

Finn, watching, felt the memory of that plan settle back into him with full clarity. He revered fully now. And it was because he remembered that a deep frown colored his face immediately.

Something went terribly wrong...

The plan had been sound. The hiding had worked exactly as intended across every era the slideshow had shown him. The Gods searching and finding nothing, life after life unremarkable and undetected, the ambient divinity of Earth reducing exactly as he had projected until the modern age arrived and the old pantheons were mythology in textbooks rather than active divine forces in the world. The conditions he had been waiting for had arrived. The long patience had paid out.

He should have lived out that modern life normally. Died naturally. Re-entered the cycle and emerged on the other side as the Errant again, with the full authority restored and none of the old hunters in any condition to pursue what they had been pursuing in the mythological age.

Instead, he had been in a university library with a headache building behind his eyes, and then he had been somewhere else entirely.

Someone had found him. In the modern age, after thousands of years of successful concealment, with the seal on his authority. Someone had found exactly who he was and had reached across the boundary of a different world to pull him out of the cycle before it completed.

Someone who had looked through thousands of years of careful, meticulous concealment and found Phineas underneath... found the Errant underneath...

Finn opened his eyes.

He was in the chamber.

At some point during the memories — during the entire slideshow of Phineas’s life and the mythological age and the centuries of reincarnation and the plan that had been interrupted — he had kept walking. His body had carried him the rest of the way down the slope and through the entrance and into the chamber itself while his mind had been entirely elsewhere, and he hadn’t noticed the transition.

The chamber was wide and still. The same diffuse sourceless light as the temple above, spread thin across a space that felt larger than its walls suggested. The air was the stalest he had encountered in this entire temple, the deep sealed quality of somewhere that had been waiting with absolute patience for a specific visitor rather than just any visitor.

At the center was a circular podium.

Simple, low, the surface of it level and dark. Nothing ornate about the structure itself. What sat in the center of its surface was a pool of liquid that moved without any source of motion, slow continuous ripples crossing its surface from no particular origin point, the liquid itself carrying a quality that made his Error vision register it differently than it registered everything else in this corridor. It bent slightly around the edges of the pool, the green light adjusting itself to process what it was looking at.

Finn walked toward it.

The voice from before sounded in the chamber. Fully deferential now, the earlier formality entirely replaced by something closer to reverence.

[Lord Errant. What stands before you is the Mirror of Clarity. It was formed from the tear of a Great One, in an age before this temple existed]

[Gazing into it reveals the truth of any question brought to it. It has also driven every being who has ever looked into it to complete madness]

[I will advise you to tread with caution, Lord Errant...]

Finn kept walking.

He already had a question. One that had been sharpening itself across the entire length of the corridor, through every memory the slideshow had shown him, arriving now at its clearest and most precise form.

Someone had found him in the modern age of Earth. Someone had identified the soul of Phineas the Errant through thousands of years of perfect concealment, through a seal on the authority and memory that had been precise enough to fool even the Gods who had been specifically hunting him. Someone had understood exactly what they were looking at and had reached through the boundary between worlds and pulled him out before the cycle could complete.

He reached the podium. Looked down at the rippling surface of the mirror, the liquid moving in its slow continuous pattern, the sourceless reflection of the chamber ceiling visible in it alongside something else — a depth below the surface that the chamber itself didn’t have, a sense of looking into something that extended further than the physical container suggested was possible.

The tear of a Great One.

Finn could feel his eyes beginning to hurt just from looking at it. He hadn’t even seen his reflection yet, and already he was pushing his Error vision to the maximum just to keep the mirror in focus and not succumb to the madness that was threatening to creep in.

But Finn didn’t care about the pain at all.

All that was in his mind was finding out the truth.

What would he see in that mirror once he truly looked at it?

Finn leaned forward and brought himself over the podium...

...then looked straight down.