CHAPTER 91: THE STAGNANT SEA

The leader stood at the front, taller than the others, with a posture that radiated authority. The face he wore was distinctly male, and unlike the others, it could actually move. The smile could widen, the eyes could narrow, though its default state was still that uncanny smile.

On his chest, instead of two circles, there were five, arranged in a star-like configuration, with shorter inscriptions below. The same exact inscriptions also wound around his neck and across its forehead.

Right off the bat, Finn could already tell this husk was a significant step above the others.

His eyes tracked the three Ossuarists as they climbed toward the canopy, watching them with the kind of patient amusement a cat might show a trapped mouse.

As if what they were doing was futile...

Then, slowly, deliberately, he raised one foot and took a single step forward.

Immediately, Finn felt a sickening sensation overwhelm him. It felt like space was being squeezed and stretched simultaneously, like the entire space around them had just been compressed and then expanded back out in a split second.

His head swam for a second and he struggled to reorient himself.

Through his haze, he spotted Althea and Tron also spinning in the air, falling.

Then he shook off the feeling and righted himself, using his wings to quickly stabilize in the air. Althea and Tron also resummoned their soul masses after a few seconds, catching themselves in the air as they vigilantly scanned their surroundings despite their muddled state.

And immediately, their eyes locked onto a figure floating above them.

It was the leader of the Husk creatures below.

He floated in the air without any artifacts,without any flying beast, or any flying mechanism. He stood stably above them, as if gravity was only a suggestion to him.

He tilted his head, observing the three of them with his face morphing forcefully into a curious expression. It was like he was struggling to make a human face. To have the correct expression for the moment.

The uncanny sight sent a shiver down their spines as they looked on tensely.

Finn could hear Tron breathing heavily, as if he was priming himself to make a move.

"Scatter!" Tron yelled out and swerved his Griffin backwards, dashing in the opposite direction of the floating Husk leader.

Finn and Althea reacted immediately too, speeding into the distance, Finn banking left and Althea banking right, all just trying to put as much distance between the Husk and themself, but not knowing where they were headed.

Finn had never flown as fast as he did. The wind roared against his ears, but he kept his gaze forward, only daring to glance back once to see who the creature would pursue.

Where is he?! His eyes searched the spot where the Husk leader previously stood in the air.

He had barely finished the thought when his searching eyes suddenly focused on a movement in Tron’s direction.

Huh?

A shrill, rising static began to drone in Finn’s ears and he felt his heart thump hardly against his chest.

Below the Husk leader, a headless body was falling to the ground... with a griffin soul mass that was dispersing into shadowy flecks, never to be summoned again.

He killed Tron...

The realization repeated in his mind as the static droned louder in his ears.

Tron is dead.

Mechanically, Finn turned his gaze forward, just as the Husk leader turned his head in his direction.

With a mind-numbing burst of speed, Finn dashed into the green forest, weaving his way through trees haphazardly, zig-zagging and moving unpredictably to prevent any correct spatial jump the Husk leader might make.

The forest blurred around Finn as he flew with every ounce of speed the Ferropteryx embodiment could give him.

Tron is dead.

The thought kept ringing in his head, but Finn shoved it down. This was no time for grief, or shock, or anything except his survival.

Behind him, death was coming.

Finn banked hard left around a massive trunk, then immediately dove low, skimming so close to a branch that his wings caught it and sent splinters flying. Then up again, spiraling around another tree, changing direction every few seconds in patterns that had no logic or predictability.

Make it impossible for him to predict where I’ll be. That was the only thought in his head.

The air suddenly rippled and space compressed around Finn, turning his stomach inside out. But he bit his tongue immediately, forcing his mind to maintain clarity and fight through the disorientation.

The Husk leader appeared twenty feet ahead, smiling that uncanny smile and raising his hand up to strike.

Finn twisted violently mid-flight. He corkscrewed in a manner that still maintained his blistering speed, grunting as the G-Force from such an abrupt change in direction rocked his innards.

Then he was past the Husk leader, changing altitude, changing direction, moving haphazardly.

The air rippled again.

This time the Husk leader appeared forty feet to his right, way too far from his position. It seemed Finn’s erratic movements had worked.

Keep moving Finn! Don’t think! Just—!

Another ripple.

This time the Husk leader materialized directly in his path, stretching out a hand in a grasping motion.

Finn folded his wings completely and dropped, plummeting straight down like a stone. The outstretched hand closed on empty air where he’d been a fraction of a second before.

Finn snapped his wings open again at the last possible moment, catching air barely ten feet above the forest floor, rocketing forward between massive roots that jutted from the ground in tangles.

The Husk leader appeared in front of him again.

And this time, his face had changed.

The pleasant smile had shifted into something else totally.

There was no anger on his face — he seemed incapable of that — but instead, something like focus. Like he had stopped playing and decided to take this seriously.

His hand came up like it was conjuring a ranged spell, and Finn saw space itself beginning to distort around his fingers.

Finn banked so hard his wing joints screamed in protest, veering right, then immediately left, then into a spiral that took him up through a gap in the canopy.

The spatial spell just barely missed him. He felt it pass within inches of his feet, and a cold shiver went down his spine. Without even seeing the effects, he could tell that if it had connected, his legs would simply have been deleted from existence.

I’m going to die.

The thought was surprisingly clear in his mind, delivered by the logical part of him.

This is a losing struggle. This thing is learning my patterns. It’s getting closer with every jump. Eventually it will land a hit, and—

Suddenly, through the canopy ahead, Finn caught a glimpse of something in the distance.

The sea.

The Stagnant Sea, where waves stood frozen like mountain ranges, where the laws of time and space and gravity were utterly and thoroughly broken...

The place they’d all agreed was instant death to approach.

I’m back here?

The thought struck Finn as uncanny. Despite all the random, haphazard movements. Blistering through the forest without any rhyme or reason. Without even knowing which direction was north or south, or east or west...?

Then suddenly it struck him.

It’s that thing again. The fragment inside me? The intuition. The thing that helped me find Syf’s true psyche. The thing that let me see Priest when no one else could...

He’d been flying toward the sea unconsciously. Every turn, every evasive maneuver, every desperate direction change... they’d all been moving him closer to this...

Because some part of him... the part that always found the flaws, the errors, the right choice in impossible situations... had been guiding him here.

The Husk leader appeared again, but this time, his spatial jump landed further off-target than the previous few. As if Finn’s random movements were becoming more unpredictable rather than less.

No... not more unpredictable...

Finn thought. Rather, more correct.

Just like it’s trying to predict my patterns, I’m also subconsciously finding the flaws in its prediction. The errors in how it’s calculating my trajectory.

The Husk leader appeared again and growled in frustration this time.

It was thirty feet to the left after Finn made a couple of random changes. Way off target...

Finn could feel a tinge of it now, that same sensation... that same unspoken clarity he’d felt when finding the weak point in the collapsing pocket space back in Aethelos, when determining exactly where Syf’s true psyche was hiding during his aspect adaptation.

This wasn’t instinct. This wasn’t luck.

It was Error. His fragment. Finding the flaws in reality itself and exploiting them.

The Husk leader’s spatial jumps weren’t perfect. And now they were even less so because the space here was broken. They were still a distance away from the Stagnant sea, but the traces of whatever cataclysmic battle had scarred the sea already affected them this far out.

And Finn’s nature let him instinctively sense those imperfections. Let him know — without knowing how he knew — exactly which direction to move to bypass the Husk leader’s jumps.

The Stagnant Sea grew larger in his view, filling him with the same sense of danger he had felt upon seeing it the first time.

But Finn gritted his teeth and flew faster.

If I can feel the flaws in the Husk’s spatial jumps... maybe I can feel the safe paths through the sea too...

Maybe that’s why I’ve been heading here the whole time.

Another spatial ripple occurred.

The Husk leader appeared again. This time fifty feet behind him. Completely missing its mark.

Finn’s evasive maneuver had been instinctive, pulling him into a spiral that exploited some microscopic inconsistency in how space was warping around them.

The sea was less than a mile away now. Close enough that it was all that took up Finn’s view.

Close enough to feel how wrong everything was in that space. How the fundamental rules that made the world work had been shattered completely there.

The Husk leader appeared again. And this time it was so far off, it seemed to have given up chasing after Finn.

It was behind him, and ways off to his right.

And on its face, an amused smile morphed unnaturally.

It recognized what Finn wanted to attempt.

And it was content to watch Finn like a spectacle.

Because it knew nothing could survive in the Stagnant Sea...

Absolutely nothing...