The corridor sloped downward.
That was the first thing Finn noticed. Every other corridor in this temple had been level passageways that led straight to their chambers without any sense of descent or ascent. This one went down. And aside from that, it was also a much simpler, unadorned corridor with smooth walls that had no features worth noting.
There were no temperature shifts, no vibration in the ground or walls, no environntal hostility pressing against him the way nearly every other corridor had. No weight in the air. No sense of sothing old being briefly directed at him from the chamber below...
It was by all ans, just a normal corridor that was slightly eerie because of the darkness and the sounds of his footsteps echoing in the silence as he walked downwards.
Finn continued to walk in this sa silence for what felt like more than ten minutes. The sourceless light that had been present through every other corridor in this temple didn’t reach here. The darkness thickened with each step until he was navigating by his Error vision alone, his eyes running at full throttle, casting the corridor walls and floor in cold green that showed him everything clearly while giving it all that slight quality of being adjacent to normal reality rather than inside it.
Already, he’d been suppressing the passive bleeds from his Error Vision for practically weeks now, trying to manage the increased soul density he had and prevent his sealed divinity from powering his Error Vision. Here he had no such worry. He had more control over it, so he let it run fully. Didn’t suppress it at all. The corridor seed to want it open, and more practically, he wanted every bit of perception available to him for whatever was at the bottom of this slope.
The air changed gradually as he descended. The clean, strange quality the rest of the temple had maintained — that impossible freshness of a place that existed slightly outside of normal logic — gave way to the sll of age. Of sothing that had been sealed for a very long ti. The air began to feel Musty and stale, and Finn’s anticipation climbed with each step forward.
Vengeance, Althea had said.
He kept turning the word over. Looking at it from different angles, trying to find the shape of what she’d ant. Vengeance against what? Vengeance for what? Vengeance belonging to whom? Him? Or sothing waiting for him?
He was still turning the thought over in his mind when all of a sudden, a familiar voice sounded.
It pressed against his mind first. He felt it try to enter directly, the way the temple had spoken to him at the Crimson Fist Tyrant’s corridor all those weeks ago, transmitting straight into his consciousness, bypassing the senses entirely. But his ntal defenses were a different thing now than they had been then. Eleven soul masses ford a density of self that the voice simply didn’t have the force to push through, and rather than failing silently it redirected, and spoke aloud in the corridor around him instead.
[Welco to the tomb of ages past. The convergence of branching divergence, Lord Errant.]
Finn raised a brow.
Lord Errant?
The first ti the temple had addressed him, at the Tyrant’s corridor, it had been neutral — formal in the way a chanism is formal, speaking to a visitor whose standing hadn’t been established yet. Standard address for sothing that didn’t know what it was dealing with.
This was different. He could hear it in the register of the words, in the particular quality of the pause before his title. Deference. Recognition. The tomb knew what had walked down this corridor, knew what he had beco across every chamber above, and it was addressing him accordingly.
Finn resud walking, filing away his observation before finally processing the ssage the voice had spoken, over in his mind.
The tomb of ages past. The convergence of branching divergence...
A tomb clearly ant preservation. And the second part — branching divergence that had converged — could an many things. But Finn, based on his situation and how he had co to be here, settled on: "Tilines that had split from a common origin and followed their separate trajectories until they arrived at a single eting point."
A tomb of records, he thought. Every version of what led here, preserved...
But how do I access any of it? He looked around curiously, still not seeing any sign of a chamber in sight.
He didn’t need to look for long though.
As if in response to his thoughts, the answer ca imdiately... not as a voice, but as a flood, images rushing into his mind so dense and so fast that he stopped walking entirely and put his hand against the corridor wall. The stone was solid under his palm, the only fixed point in a mont where everything else was moving.
He watched his own life scroll backward.
This was not impressionistic or dreamlike the way mories usually were, rather, these were clear and sharp enough that he could make out every individual detail as if he were physically present in each mont, standing inside it rather than observing from outside.
The slideshow moved in reverse chronology, fast but not so fast that he missed anything, like his mind had been storing all of this for a very long ti and was now playing it back at the highest possible fidelity.
He saw Hoshin Bay. The farmhouse in the Sprawl. The early weeks of building identity and reputation from nothing, manufacturing the Errant God from scratch in a world that had never heard the na. He saw the docks. Boss Murdo. Jon’s face the first ti they spoke.
The slideshow moved back further. To the mont he, Althea and Ailin were betrayed by their Transcendent colleagues. Back to their entry into this plane. Back to his years as Arros.
It continued to go even further back. To the mont of his transmigration into Arros. Back into the future tiline he’d been taken from. To Madoc, and the island, and the space the Anaelle had created to pull him backward through ti. Then further still, past that point entirely. To Osmund... And then the Stagnant Sea.
Finn’s focus sharpened involuntarily as that particular mory arrived. At the ti, he had seen the things in the frozen wave and registered them with the eyes he’d had then — which had been capable eyes, aningfully capable, but still the eyes of soone who couldn’t be spoken of in the sa sentence as the current him.
Even in the trance state he’d been in at the ti, those eyes had still only seen the things he’d seen in the temporal frozen wave of the Stagnant sea as simply massive and powerful, and nothing else beyond that...
But now... these eyes saw divinity.
The Titans. Impossibly tall, frozen mid-motion in the suspended wave, their arms stretched upward toward a surface that had stopped existing the mont whatever power had sealed this place locked the water in ti. He could see the divine essence in them now, running through their forms like a secondary skeleton, the kind of power that didn’t belong in his world — in a world where only mana existed, where divinity had no pathway to manifest. And yet there it was, clear and unmistakable.
The Leviathans moved through the frozen water between them. Serpentine and enormous, winding through the suspended mont in pursuit of the climbing ships that had been caught in the crossing, their bodies carrying the sa divine quality as the Titans but expressed differently — denser, more concentrated, less spread across a massive physical form and more compressed into sothing that moved with terrible efficiency. Things that had no nas because nothing that had ever seen them clearly had survived to give them one.
He looked at the whole frozen scene with everything he now had and understood what he was looking at. This was a battle. An actual battle between things of divine nature, from an era so far back it predated every piece of history he’d ever encountered in either of his tilines, sealed into permanent suspension by a power superior to everyone involved. Immortalized mid-conflict, every participant locked exactly where they had been, the outco perpetually deferred.
A war from an age that nobody rembered, preserved in the substance of the Stagnant Sea for reasons he didn’t yet have the context to understand.
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