Glorified errand boy.
The Vested, he learned, were basically the Ossuary’s secret maintenance staff. They maintained restricted sections of the libraries, ensuring ancient texts remained preserved and catalogued.
They carried confidential ssages that couldn’t be entrusted to communication artifacts. They hand-delivered notes between high-ranking Ossuarists who didn’t want their communication recorded.
They fetched specialized soul tools from secure storage. They assisted with mundane but sensitive tasks like preparing chambers for high-level assimilations or clearing areas after particularly ssy soul debt incidents.
They were trusted with secrets, but only because they were too low-ranked and too closely monitored to do anything aningful with that trust.
Finn carried out his duties as a Vested efficiently and without complaint, but he remained watchful and observant.
He noted which areas of the Soul Sanctum were most heavily warded. Which levels seed to have the most traffic versus those that remained eerily empty even during peak hours.
He filed it all away, building a ntal map of the intricacies of the Ossuary itself. His title as a Vested made it such that no one paid attention to him whenever he moved around.
The only real downside of the role, one that irked him greatly, was the complete lack of privacy.
The Vested were housed in communal quarters. Five to a room, sleeping in narrow bunks with barely enough space to move between them. His roommates were all older than him by at least a decade, n and won who’d been Vested for years and had long since accepted this as their permanent station.
They weren’t unkind, but they also weren’t particularly interested in befriending the new addition to their ranks. They had been prid for years not to be inquisitive, so they just did their jobs, slept their allotted hours, and asked no questions despite the fact Finn had caught them staring many tis, especially because of his tal-like wings.
Finn had no problem with their silence and non-inquisitiveness, but the fact that they were always around also ant that he was never alone.
And that ant his soul debts were becoming increasingly difficult to manage...
It had taken him two days to realize why Althea’s Order Edict wasn’t providing lasting relief.
It was because of the Pride Before Healing soul debt.
The debt made his body reject assistance. It reduced the effectiveness of any healing or stabilization provided by others by 70%. Which ant Althea’s temporary fix wore off far faster than it should have, leaving him to wrestle with the Ferropteryx’s nature largely on his own.
Besides that, the Live Prey Compulsion was another obvious issue.
Food prepared in the Vested’s communal dining area made him nauseous. His body rejected it on an instinctive level, recognizing that he hadn’t killed it himself. He managed to choke down enough to avoid unnecessary attention, but it provided almost no nutrition. He could feel himself growing weaker, his body slowly starving despite having access to als.
He needed to hunt. To kill sothing with his own hands and consu it.
But there was nowhere in the Soul Sanctum to do that without raising unnecessary questions.
The Sovereign’s Isolation was equally problematic.
Being in close quarters with four other people made his skin crawl. Every accidental brush of contact when passing in the narrow space between bunks felt... degrading, as if his very nature was being insulted. He found himself unconsciously pulling away whenever soone ca too close, fighting the urge to lash out at them and create distance.
Unsurprisingly, his roommates noticed. They started giving him more space, but from their expressions Finn could see they thought he was just antisocial or suffering from so sort of trauma. The Ossuarist world was chock full of broken people anyway.
Finn let them think whatever they wanted. It was easier than explaining.
Another of the debts, The Sky Tyrant’s Vertigo, was also troubleso because it drove him to seek height.
Being underground and surrounded by stone walls created a constant background anxiety that gnawed at his mind. He felt trapped. Suffocated. Wrong.
So to redy this, he developed a routine.
Every day, during the brief periods between assigned tasks, Finn would make his way all the way up to the top levels of the Soul Sanctum, past the entrance at top level, and into the public-facing administrative building that sat above.
Ten floors up, at the very top, he’d found a secluded corner. It was a maintenance access point that led to a narrow exterior ledge overlooking the vast empty lands where the Soul Sanctum was built.
Finn would go there and simply stand with his wings spread wide, feeling the wind, the open air and the vast sky above him for five to ten minutes. That was all he could spare before his presence was needed elsewhere.
But those brief monts of solitude and height kept him sane.
Barely...
This was Finn’s routine for the following days.
But by the fifth day, Finn reached his limit.
He needed privacy. Real privacy. Ti and space to actually address his soul debts rather than just managing them mont to mont.
He’d spent hours analyzing potential solutions during the sleepless nights when his Predatory Insomnia kept him alert and restless. His mind had cycled and re-cycled through every mythological figure he could rember from Earth, searching for the perfect counter to the Ferropteryx Eagle’s chaotic nature.
He previously had a mythical figure in mind, but even still, it was all he could do to keep his mind busy, so he kept comparing and contrasting, weighing the characteristics of different characters against each other...
And now he’d found his answer.
Garuda. The divine mount. The loyal servant who chose duty over tyranny and righteous purpose over prideful independence.
It was perfect. Thematically, Garuda had lots of aspects that opposed the Ferropteryx’s nature while still maintaining the core power and majesty of a sky dominator.
But he needed ti to attempt the Aspect Adaptation. He needed hours of uninterrupted focus to carefully channel the mythological essence, to impress it upon the Ferropteryx soul mass and reshape its fundantal nature.
And he needed to do it sowhere no one would interrupt. Sowhere no one would witness what he was capable of.
The Soul Sanctum offered no such place... At least not for soone of his rank.
Finn lay in his narrow bunk, staring at the stone ceiling barely three feet above his face, listening to his roommates’ steady breathing as they slept through another night.
His wings ached from being folded so tightly for so long. His stomach growled with hunger that normal food couldn’t satisfy. His skin crawled from hours of proximity to others.
Once in a while when he t Althea, she helped him by using her Order Edict, which pacified the debts for a short while.
But it was clear that was not enough.
Just a few more days, he told himself. He just had to wait till the mass-deploynt started. Hopefully, the Vested were also going to be a part of the deployed Ossuarists.
Then, in the chaos of a new world, where eyes couldn’t be kept on them as strictly, he would find a private place to permanently redy his situation...
He had to.
Because if he didn’t stabilize the Ferropteryx soon, he wasn’t sure how much longer he could maintain the facade of control.
.
.
The news ca on the sixth day.
Finn was in the middle of delivering a sealed ssage to a Caretaker on the seventeenth underground level when he felt a sudden shift in the Soul Sanctum’s atmosphere.
A collective tension rippled through every Ossuarist he passed. People began moving with greater urgency. Conversations beca quick and curt. Ossuarists who’d been walking at normal pace suddenly accelerated toward specific destinations.
Sothing had happened.
Finn completed his delivery quickly, then made his way toward one of the main ssage boards where official announcents for Vested were posted. He forced his way through the throng of Vested, clearing people out of his way with his massive wings and earning curses by the way.
But he didn’t care. He quickly reached the front and scanned the announcent hastily.
MOBILIZATION NOTICE - VESTED PERSONNEL ONLY.
To All Vested Personnel:
As of 04:47 this morning, the World Tear barrier has begun accepting entry. Stable passages have been created. Full mobilization protocols are now active.
Vested Assignnt:
Due to your unique clearance status and operational knowledge, select Vested personnel will be deployed as peripheral support for Caretaker-led teams and standard Ossuarist units operating within the breach.
Nas Of The Selected Listed In Alphabetical Order By Surna:
Abigail Aarons
Adam Abe...
Finn’s eyes rapidly shuffled through the nas, looking for Finnegan Slade, Finn, Slade, or anything similar to that.
All around him, the voices of the Vested rose in excitent.
I’m assigned to a team—!
Finally! Sothing actually interesting!
I heard they could see entire cities in there—
My cousin’s a Caretaker, maybe I’ll finally—
Finn tuned them all out, focusing fully on searching for his na as his heart thumped against his chest.
Nothing.
His heart started to pound harder. He could feel his agitation growing with every passing second. The Ferropteryx’s influence made the sensation sharper, more visceral.
No. No. Check more carefully, he chided himself, releasing a breath, and slowly, very slowly checking through the nas despite the fact he already knew the answer he feared to admit.
But after another minute of repeated, careful check-throughs, he had no choice but to admit it.
His na wasn’t there.
Out of dozens, maybe even more than a hundred Vested being deployed, his na was conspicuously absent.
Why?
The question burned through his mind, droning with increasing intensity.
Was it because he was new? Because he was too young, too untested? Because soone had flagged him as unreliable due to his obvious soul debt issues?
Or was it sothing else?
"Hey move out of the way asshole! You’re blocking our view!" Soone behind him yelled, and he snapped back to attention, wading his way out of the crowd as his mind moved rapidly in a jumble of thoughts.
What happens now? What can I do? What about Althea? Could she sohow do sothing about this? The Preceptor? Priest...?
Priest.
Finn frowned imdiately. Was this his doing? Was it him who made this happen?
He had barely finished the thought when suddenly, he felt a gaze on him. A familiar gaze.
His head snapped up at the chain bridge that cut across overhead.
On it, smiling down at him with his set of pearly white teeth and his usual playfulness, was Priest.
A slow scowl began to color Finn’s face as he locked gaze with the man. But it was schooled quickly to a blank expression after he noticed two things.
One, Priest was clearly visible to everyone. He was in plain sight, unhiding.
And two, he was not alone. Beside Priest, on his left, was Althea, looking down at him with a soft gaze. And by his right, was a young man Finn had never seen before...
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