Magical Soul Parade

"Agent Fors."

The woman's voice was calm and measured, carrying the kind of effortless authority that came from never having to raise it.

Fors immediately bowed his head. "Lady Thalia."

Thalia, Finn noted, filing the name away.

The woman — Thalia — didn't acknowledge the greeting beyond a slight incline of her head. Her gray eyes remained fixed on Finn, studying him with an intensity that made his skin prickle.

"Do you want to fight on behalf of the Crown?" she asked with an almost conversational tone despite the weight of the question.

Fors blinked. "My lady?"

"Sometimes you take things too far with your tests," Thalia continued, though her gaze was still locked on Finn. "You forget I'm here. Do you really think anyone can try anything... untoward... while I'm overseeing the Transcendent project?"

There was no threat in her words. No posturing. Just a statement of fact delivered with a kind of calm confidence that bordered on haughty — though it didn't seem intentional. More like she simply saw the world differently. Saw herself as untouchable because, perhaps, she genuinely was.

Fors opened his mouth, then closed it. After a moment, he simply bowed again.

"Of course, my lady. Forgive the intrusion."

He didn't try to explain himself, or defend his actions, or justify the test. He simply accepted her words and retreated into professional silence.

Finn felt the shock of his initial recognition fading, replaced by his usual cold analytical assessment. He desperately hoped his face hadn't betrayed too much when she'd first appeared — she'd been watching him very carefully then, measuring his reaction.

Now, with his composure mostly restored, he studied her in return.

The way she carried herself. The measured tone of her words. The calm, almost regal bearing. The fact that she looked so much like Althea, yet carried herself with even more inherent authority.

She acts like royalty, Finn realized.

And apparently, he wasn't wrong.

"Arros," Thalia said, finally speaking directly to him. "That's your name, yes?"

"It is."

Her eyes narrowed fractionally, and then she repeated his earlier threat word for word with her voice never wavering from the same measured tone:

"I would escape. And then I would gain strength. And then I would come back and kill every single one of them. Down to the last chickens in their households. Down to the last stone in their foundations. I would erase them so thoroughly that future historians would wonder if they ever existed at all…"

She paused, watching him.

"You really believe you can do all that?"

Finn met her gaze steadily and nodded.

"That's exactly what I would do."

Behind him, Fors's jaw visibly clenched. But Thalia's expression didn't change at all. She simply observed him thoughtfully, as if he were an interesting specimen she was cataloging.

Then she nodded once.

"I would kill you before you could do anything anyway," she said in that same plain, matter-of-fact tone. "So the threat doesn't matter."

Finn felt a humorless sound try to escape his throat, something between a laugh and a scoff. He stifled it, but not quite quickly enough.

Thalia noticed, and she tilted her head slightly.

"You must be confident in your strength, then," she observed.

Before Finn could respond, she turned and gestured down the corridor.

"Come. We're almost there."

She began walking, and Finn fell into step beside her. Fors remained a respectful distance behind, having apparently been relieved of escort duty simply by Thalia's presence.

"Your ability," Thalia said after a moment. "What is it?"

Finn glanced at her.

"The reports describe your body moving across space in an unusual manner," she continued. "Leaving trails of yourself behind. Afterimages."

She looked at him with those penetrating gray eyes.

"For those with no frame of reference, such a display is merely strange. But for those of us who know of spatial manipulation..." She paused meaningfully. "What you did doesn't match how space actually behaves. So I ask again: what is your ability?"

Finn didn't answer immediately.

The question itself wasn't offensive, at least he didn't think it was. But years of hiding his capabilities, of keeping Error secret, made automatic deflection his first instinct.

And beyond that, he genuinely didn't know the protocol here. Was it considered rude to ask directly about someone's Transcendent abilities? Or was openness expected among their kind?

For someone like the Space holder, disguising their magic would be nearly impossible. Space was space. But Error could be masked, could be explained away as something else entirely.

Though in hindsight, if he wanted to actually learn from these people, he'd need to trust them to some extent... Probably.

Instead of answering her question, Finn asked his own.

"What's yours?"

Thalia stopped walking and turned to look at him fully.

For a moment, he wondered if he'd miscalculated. If his deflection had been taken as an insult.

Then she smiled faintly — the first real expression he'd seen from her.

"Order," she said simply. "I control Order. I can impose structure on chaos, enforce patterns on randomness, make reality adhere to rules of my choosing." She paused. "Within limits, of course. But those limits are... broad."

Finn felt genuine surprise flicker through him.

The directness. The complete lack of hesitation or concern about revealing her capabilities. She'd just laid out the fundamental nature of her power without a second thought.

And in that moment, he realized his mistake.

He was still operating like a hunted Ossuarist — Yes. An Ossuarist — like someone who needed to hide and be cautious and watchful. It wasn't just something he learned by being an Arcanist in this world, but something that had been ingrained in him right from his time as an Ossuarist back in the future timeline…

But Transcendents were different. They existed on a level where such concerns were... irrelevant.

Thalia simply didn't care if anyone knew what she could do. She was confident — supremely confident — in her ability to defeat anyone who might have "ideas" about exploiting that knowledge.

The realization crystallized something in Finn's mind.

"Error," he said without hesitation. "I control Error."

Thalia's head whipped back around, genuine surprise breaking through her composed exterior.

"Error?"

"I exploit errors in reality," Finn elaborated. "Flaws. Mistakes. The places where things don't work quite right. I can make mechanisms fail, logic break down, cause reality itself to... glitch."

Thalia stared at him for a long moment with something like fascination dawning in her gray eyes.

"An antithesis," she murmured. "Your power is almost an antithesis to mine." Her gaze sharpened. "Is that why I felt that strange resonance from you? That sense of... wrongness?"

Finn's attention focused immediately. "You felt—"

But he cut himself off.

They'd reached the end of the corridor.

And what lay ahead made Finn's eyebrows rise.

It looked almost like a chaos breach — that telltale warping of space, that sense of wrongness that preceded rifts to exotic planes.

But it wasn't quite right. The energy signature was different. More controlled. Deliberate.

A portal, he realized. Or a barrier. The work of the Space holder, no doubt.

Thalia glanced at him, noting his reaction, then turned to Fors.

"Thank you, Agent. I'll take it from here."

Fors bowed. "My lady."

He turned and headed back up the corridor without another word, as if he wasn't permitted past this point.

Thalia approached the spatial distortion, then looked back at Finn with an expression that might have been curiosity.

"Step through," she said.