Chapter 175: Retreat "We abort." Thalia’s voice cut through the oppressive silence like a blade. She stood over Ailin’s unconscious form, staring down grimly, but determination set on her face. "We’re leaving this world. Immediately." Nobody argued. Even Himothy, the Glory bearer who lived for challenges, who thrived on impossible odds, remained silent. The big man simply nodded mutely, still trembling from the Great One’s presence. Keeva, Yara, and Osric had arrived while Finn was still processing the devastation. They stood in a tight cluster, taking in the dead settlement, Ailin’s grotesque condition, Solarius’s exploded remains visible through the warehouse entrance. "How?" Tavian asked quietly in response to Thalia’s statement. "We can’t leave unless we find the breach that brought us here—" "Casmir’s artifact," Thalia interrupted, pulling the crystalline object from her robes. It pulsed irregularly with spatial distortions flickering across its surface. "We wait until his pair activates. However long that takes. Then we tunnel to his location and figure out how to leave from there. He’s the Space Transcendent after all. He should be able to feel the spatial disturbance and know where the exit is..." "And Ailin?" Deacon asked in a rough voice and with his hands still pressed to his bleeding eyes. "We keep her alive," Thalia said flatly. "Or we try... That’s all we can do." The verdict was final. There was no grand escape plan or clever tactic. This was a simple retreat without any extravagance. They were aborting the mission right here. How far we’ve fallen, Finn thought numbly. From divine ambition to desperate flight in the span of... minutes. . . The days that followed blurred together in an exhausted routine. They moved Ailin to the cleanest building they could find — a merchant’s home with intact walls and minimal damage. Yara and Keeva took turns watching her, monitoring the cracks spreading across her swollen skull, waiting for the inevitable rupture that never quite came. Because somehow, impossibly, Ailin showed signs of improvement. Her head still remained grotesquely distended, twice its normal size with her skin stretched so thin it was nearly translucent. But the expansion had stopped. The cracks ceased increasing. And even her irregular breathing gradually steadied into something approaching normal rhythm. She remained unconscious. Unresponsive. But at least she was clearly alive. "Her mind is... adapting," Deacon observed on the third day, his own eyes were still bloodshot but also healing. The damage he took was minor compared to Ailin. "Will she survive?" Thalia asked. "I don’t know," Deacon admitted. "Truth shows me she’s changing. Becoming something... different. But whether that change is sustainable or will eventually kill her anyway, I can’t see." Besides Deacon and Thalia, Finn visited her once each day. He sat beside her for hours and stared at her swollen, cracked head to remind himself that he was the main cause of her current state. He hoped everyday that she would get better and somehow come out of this alive. But he knew that even if she did, her life would never remain the same again. Besides himself, the other Transcendents also did the same, coming to sit by Ailin regularly. They all knew that to some extent, they bore a responsibility to Ailin. But still, no one felt that responsibility as much as Finn. . . When not tending to Ailin, the Transcendents threw themselves into salvaging what knowledge they could from the settlement. Books. Scrolls. Written records that had survived the Great One’s casual genocide. The settlement’s small library, personal journals, merchant ledgers, temple archives, anything with writing became a precious resource. The problem was language. The local script was utterly foreign. The letters were written in flowing curves and angular slashes that bore no resemblance to any alphabet Finn knew. Without Deacon’s translation effect active constantly, the text was incomprehensible. "We need to crack this," Thalia said on the second day, spreading scrolls across a table. "If we’re going to understand divine mechanics, faith systems, God hierarchies, we need to be able to read their source materials directly." Deacon stepped forward. "I will do what I can with my intent-deciphering. My Truth can extract meaning from written words even without understanding the language consciously." Thalia nodded, about to leave it up to Deacon, but Finn interjected. "I think I can help too..." Everyone turned to look at him. "Error," Finn explained, "fundamentally operates by finding flaws in systems. Language is a system made up of arbitrary symbols mapped to specific meanings. If I can identify the gaps in that mapping, the points where meaning fails to translate cleanly, I might be able to reverse-engineer the structure." "That’s not how language works," Keeva raised a brow skeptically. "No," Finn agreed. "But it’s how Error works. I can see where the system breaks down, which tells me how it’s supposed to function when it’s working correctly. It’s just up to my creativity." Thalia considered this. "Do it." . . The two started on the task immediately. Deacon stared at the words with his golden eyes of truth that had only just healed the previous day, gleaning intent, while Finn identified structural patterns with his much improved Error Vision, seeing the minute inconsistencies in how the curves connected, how the angles varied, which components repeated across different words... Hour by hour, word by word, they built a clearer understanding of what each alphabet meant. They didn’t chase after fluency — that would take months or years. Instead, they focused on creating a working translation framework. A key that others could follow to extract basic meaning from any written record in that language. By the fourth day, they had something functional. Rough, imprecise, prone to misinterpretation, but very usable. Tavian tested it first, painstakingly working through a merchant’s ledger using the alphabet guide Finn and Deacon had created. "Grain shipment," he read with short pauses. "From... Sunward Province? To the Guardian’s temple. Payment: thirty silver and... blessed water?" "Hmm... Blessed water as currency," Yara noted. "Well, it’s not surprising they’d incorporate something divine into their economy too." They had cracked the language barrier. Not perfectly, but enough. The small victory lifted their spirits marginally, giving them something to focus on besides Ailin’s labored breathing and the dead civilians rotting in the desert heat. . . On the fifth day, Casmir’s artifact activated. Thalia felt it when her paired crystal suddenly began to flare with spatial resonance, pulling toward its other half like a magnet insistently trying to fold through space. "He’s ready," she announced, gathering everyone. "We’re leaving. Now." They assembled in the square, all of them, including Ailin’s unconscious form which was carefully wrapped to protect her swollen head. Thalia held the crystal high, channeling Order through it to stabilize the spatial connection for good measure. The artifact blazed with white light as reality tore open in a vertical line that expanded into a shimmering portal. "Go," Thalia commanded. Keeva went first, activating her disguise magic in case of ambush on the other side. Then Osric, then Tavian. Yara lifted Ailin gently, cradling the Memory bearer’s grotesque form, and stepped through. Then Himothy, Deacon, and Thalia. Finn went last, taking one final look at the dead settlement, his failed bid for divine power, his hubris made manifest in corpses and ruined ambition. Then he stepped through the spatial tunnel.