The Primordial Record -
Chapter 1782: Your Death Would Not Be Easy
“YES,” Chaos hissed, seeing the minuscule reaction from Rowan but sensing the entire realm of Oblivion shaking under his fury. “I REMEMBER THE SCENT OF THAT SOUND. IT IS A RARE THING FOR US TO INDULGE IN DESTRUCTION, BUT EOSAH…SHE WAS BORN OUTSIDE THE PROTECTION OF THE COLLECTIVE. DO YOU BLAME US IF WE DECIDED TO INDULGE? AH! IT WAS FROM THAT MOMENT I BEGAN TO LOVE PAIN, BUT I COULD NEVER FIND THE LIKES AGAIN, UNTIL I MET YOU. OH, I HAD SO MUCH FUN TORTURING YOU AND ANYTHING YOU CREATE TO BE YOUR KIN.”
He was trying to pour poison into a well that had long since frozen solid. Rowan allowed the memories to surface. The words from a Primordial carried an enormous amount of information, enough for him to see how Eosah had been slowly torn apart and tortured to death.
It would seem that newly born Realities were to be protected, but somehow Eosah was outside the boundary of protection, and so the Primordials had a rare moment where they could indulge in every depravity that their cold heart desired… Including creating several cancerous tumors inside her flesh to devour her Origin slowly from the inside… these tumors were the Primordials who had reigned supreme inside her for so long.
“You claim a lot, Chaos, but you were the spark,” Rowan said, his voice still terrifyingly calm. ” Not the hand that struck the flint. In the end, none of it would matter; you shall all pay a price for your deeds so terrible you cannot even begin to imagine.”
“YOU ARE A FOOL IF YOU THINK ANYTHING YOU DO HERE HAS ANY MEANING. MY DEATH WOULD HAVE CONSEQUENCES.”
“It does not matter; the wheels have turned, and my vengeance is here.” Rowan coldly replied, “All must be held accountable for their deeds, even Primordials. Chaos, your death shall not be easy.”
There was something of finality in Rowan’s words that touched the core of Primordial Chaos, and the truth of what he said could not be denied. Pure rage flowed through the Primordial, and he let loose the madness in his heart.
“ACCOUNTABLE?” The laugh boomed again from Chaos. “YOU AVENGED THEM BY BECOMING A GREATER MONSTER THAN ANY OF US! YOU SLAY THE SCULPTOR AND THEN COME FOR THE CLAY! YOU ARE A JOKE, ROWAN! A PATHETIC, HYPOCRITICAL JOKE WRAPPED IN TRAGEDY! YOU THINK THIS COLD ACT MAKES YOU STRONG? IT MAKES YOU EMPTY. JUST LIKE THIS PLACE.”
A mountain range on the Primordial’s back shifted, forming a colossal, sneering face. “I WAS THE FIRE IN THE BELLY OF THE EYE OF TIME WHEN IT DEVOURED YOUR SECOND MOTHER. I HAVE WATCHED THE COUNTLESS MORTAL CREATURES YOU KNOW AND LOVE DIE, AND KNOW THIS, ROWAN. EVERY HEARTBREAK, EVERY LOSS, EVERY DARK TURN OF FATE ON YOUR PATH… A PART OF MY BRUSHSTROKE WAS ON THE CANVAS OF YOUR LIFE. I AM NOT THE ONLY CONTRIBUTOR OF YOUR SUFFERING, BUT I PLAYED MY ROLE WELL!”
In these words, Rowan saw the many events of his life that held a hint of tragedy, and he knew that the Will of Chaos had been there through all of it. He did not need to take direct action. The act of wanting the suffering of Rowan naturally led to disasters happening around him all the time. Primordial Chaos had been his curse for a long time.
The words were meant to be a torrent, a flood to break the dam of Rowan’s composure. They were a recitation of a lifetime of grief, each event a carefully aimed dagger.
Rowan stood through it all. When the echoes of the Primordial’s voice faded into the hungry grey, he spoke, and his voice was the only real thing in that unreal place.
“I know,” he said simply. “I have always known. Do you think I fought my way through the Celestial Hosts for fun? Do you think I plunged into the well of sorrows and wrested the Secrets of my Origin from all your cruel hands if I did not understand where it would lead me? All my sacrifices, all my pain… Every step I took was because of you and your kind. Every enemy I felled, every power I mastered, every ounce of strength I forged in the fires of agony… it was all fuel. Fuel for this moment.”
He took a step forward. Anathema glowed with a soft, grey light that mirrored the hellscape around them.
“You didn’t create my pain, Chaos. You were merely its medium. But I… I took that pain. I took that grief. I took the memory of my children’s song and the light in my mother’s eyes and the hope in my own heart… and I burned it all down. I used the heat of that pyre to temper my will. You didn’t make me a monster. You made me a weapon. And now…”
He raised the blade.
“…the weapon has found its true target.”
The sneering face on the Primordial’s back faltered. The eyes across its form blinked in uncertainty. The tactic had failed. The poison had no effect. The being before it was not a man haunted by his past; he was the avenging spirit of that past itself, and he had made peace with his own ghost long ago.
All that was left was the purpose.
Rage, pure and undiluted by the Primordial’s recent attempts at order, erupted. “THEN COME, WEAPON! LET US SEE IF YOU CAN CUT THE HAND THAT FORGED YOU!”
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The continent that was Chaos erupted. The solidified mountains of chance shattered, releasing storms of razor-sharp probability shards that screamed through the grey air. All the time the Primordial had been talking, it was all to prepare.
The rivers of frozen time thawed in an instant, becoming torrents of corrosive temporal energy. A thousand limbs of solidified nightmare—a mix of crystal, flesh, and lightning—exploded from his mass, each one capable of unmaking a universe, now focused on a single man.
Rowan had been expecting the attack from Chaos for a while now; how else could he properly kill him if he did not allow the Primordial to attack?
He launched himself towards the calamity bearing down on him. His form became a blur of absolute motion, a defined line cutting through the undefined grey.
The limbs erupting from the Primordial moved not in a straight line, but in every possible trajectory at once. To any other being, it would be an unavoidable storm of certain death. To Rowan, it was a map.
His perception, honed by eons of war, calculated the one true path through the chaos, the single, evolving safe corridor that weaved through the infinite maybes. He flowed through the storm like a ghost, the limbs passing through the space he had occupied a nanosecond before.
An impossibly large limb of nightmare, tipped with a claw of solidified entropy, swiped down. It was a blow that could age a universe to dust. Rowan didn’t block it. He sidestepped, and as the limb passed, Anathema licked out.
The blade did not cut the limb; it severed the concept of the limb’s cohesion. The colossal appendage shattered mid-swing, not into pieces, but into a cloud of disconnected atoms that were instantly nullified by the ash.
Chaos roared, the sound a physical wave of disorientation. In the mortal realm, that roar would have unraveled DNA and scattered consciousness to the solar winds. Here, its power was muted, but still potent.
Rowan felt his armor crackle, resisting the wave of unstructured sound. He pushed through it, leaping onto the Primordial’s shifting form.
“You said you craved pain, Chaos. Show me how much you can take.”
The “ground” beneath Rowan was a living hell. It tried to dissolve into liquid paradox, to open into mouths lined with teeth of absolute zero, to become a cage of solidified space. Rowan’s every step was a battle of wills. He imposed “up” and “down” on the terrain with each footfall. He was a walking island of reality on a sea of maddened unreality.
Anathema was a constant grey arc. With every swing, he didn’t wound Chaos; he edited him. He erased a swirling vortex of destructive potential. He deleted a newly forming eye of anti-creation.
Rowan was a sculptor now, not of marble, but of a Primordial’s essence, and his chisel was unmasking. With precise strokes of his blade that would shock even Telmus, Rowan disassembled a Primordial.
“YOU FIGHT NOTHING! YOU CUT NOTHING!” Chaos bellowed, a hundred mouths forming and speaking in unison, the pain of being taken apart in this manner was such that no immortal could ever imagine, and even though he claimed he wanted to fight, his body began to turn to escape as he continued screaming. “I AM INFINITE! I AM—”
Rowan’s cold eyes saw through the acts of the Primordial and he plunged the blade deep into a pulsing nexus of energy close to the core of the Primordial. “—You are finite,” he stated, his voice cold and clear over the din. “You chose to be. To survive here, you had to become countable. You are no longer Infinite Chaos. You are merely… a problem. And I am the solution. Are you beginning to learn your lessons?”
The nexus exploded, not with energy, but with a silent, grey negation. A chunk of the Primordial’s form simply ceased to be.
Half of Primordial Chaos simply sagged, that part of his body crippled. Now, the screams of the Primordial became incredibly shrill as his chance for escape was halted.
“The lesson has just begun Chaos, we are not even at the best parts.”
“CURSE YO—”
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