The Primordial Record novel Chapter 1776

Chapter 1776: The Yearning To Become More

Old Light remained motionless, a statue of solidified brilliance. Eva did not push; there were multiple ways that the Primordial could respond to her, and the worst of them was if he chose to disregard her position and seek to consume her.

Eva was powerful, but she barely held ten percent of the total Origin of Light. On the surface, it appears as if half of heaven is under her domain, and more mortals and immortals flock to the worship of the New Light with each passing day, but Eva knew that she held only the surface layer of Light’s Origin.

There were still deeper layers of this Origin she could not access, and if she truly were a great threat to Primordial Light, he would not even let her speak, but he ultimately disdained all life inside Reality and did not honestly care that Eva had become the source of their worship.

She was fully cognizant of the fact that what made Primordial Light annoyed was his stolen authority and not the significance of that authority, so it should be plain madness to argue with him on the usage of that authority, but Eva knew a part of her father and that part was filled with pride.

He could squash her like a bug, or he could break her mind and devour the Origin she had collected. To the Old Light, the path was clear, and when he began to speak, Eva smiled inside.

"Worship is not for comfort. It is for alignment with the fundamental truth of Reality. I am that truth. I am the Light of Definition. Without me, there is only vague potentiality. There is only Chaos. I make the world real, measurable, and known. Your ’warmth’ is a statistical anomaly. Your ’growth’ is a temporary state of entropy-increase on the path to equilibrium. Your ’fury’ is wasted energy. You illuminate nothing but transient, emotional states. You are a distortion in the lens." 𝘧𝓇𝑒𝑒𝑤ℯ𝑏𝓃𝘰𝑣ℯ𝘭.𝘤ℴ𝘮

His words were hammers, each one striking to fix her nature into something lesser, something ephemeral. He was the master of definition, and his greatest weapon was to name a thing and thus make it so.

But Eva, who had become something greater than any immortal, was the master of transformation. She could not be so easily pinned.

It helped that her Light was covered by the Aura of Rowan, whose ability to evolve and adapt had become a part of her. He could not be beside her here to help, but he had done more than enough with the gifts he had given her.

"A distortion?" she mused, stopping her orbit to stand directly before him, her radiant heat causing the razor-sharp edges of his form to seem to waver, like a mirage. "Or a new focus? You define a stone by its weight, its dimensions, and its chemical composition. You show it its own insignificance in the geologic age. I show the stone, the lichen that will break it down, the seed that might root in its cracks, the shelter it provides for the mouse, and the monument it might become for the poet. You show the is. I show the could be. Which is the greater truth? The cold, dead fact? Or the living, breathing possibility?"

"Possibility is not truth," he intoned, his voice devoid of any inflection that could be mistaken for emotion. "It is merely a set of potential truths, most of which will never manifest. Your light is a lie of potential. It promises what may never be. It is the light of wishfulness, of delusion. Mine is the light of actuality. It is the light of is."

"And what is, without something to yearn for something more?" she countered, her voice dropping to a whisper that was somehow more penetrating than a shout.

It was the whisper of roots breaking stone, a cell dividing, and a star igniting. "You illuminate a barren field and call it truth. I see the same field, and I see the harvest to come, the children who will run through it, and the lovers who will meet in its shadows. My light does not lie. It invites. It inspires. It creates the very potential you dismiss. Your light is an autopsy report. Mine is a birth announcement."

The silence that followed was a battleground. Their conflicting natures pressed against each other in the Aether, creating silent storms of paradox. The void itself seemed confused, unable to reconcile the two absolute truths vying for dominance.

The Old Light shifted, the first movement he had made. It was not a human motion. It was a reconfiguration, a sliding of crystalline planes against one another, a re-optimization of his form for a new mode of engagement. The direct ontological assault was not yielding the desired collapse. He would try another vector.

Eva could feel a crushing weight beginning to surround her body; it seemed that Old Light was becoming excited.

The alien nature of a Primordial reveled in sadistic acts, and he was enjoying this battle, because he knew that in the struggle of Origin, he feared no influences because he held several Origin of Light outside the one of this Reality, but for Eva, breaking her mind would lead to such devastating consequences that even a Primordial like him salivated on the thoughts of seeing such a thing happen.

"Your existence is unsustainable," he stated, a simple, clean declaration of fact. "You speak of growth, of warmth. These are processes that consume. To grow, you must convert fuel. To provide warmth, you must burn. You are a system in a state of violent expenditure. You will consume yourself. You will rage, and flare, and burn brilliantly, and then you will gutter and die, leaving only ash and cold. A brief, passionate, and wasteful anomaly. I am perpetual. I require no fuel. I simply am. I am the constant. You are the variable. Your very nature dictates your extinction."

It was a devastatingly logical argument. He was attacking the core of her being, not as a concept, but as a physical system. He was using the laws of thermodynamics against her, the very laws his light had first defined.

Eva did not flinch. The supernovae in her eyes swirled faster, and for a moment, the fury within her eclipsed the warmth. The void around her flickered with images of consuming flames, of forests burning, of stars going nova.

"Is that what you see?" she asked, and her voice now held the crackle of embers. "Consumption? Or transformation? Yes, I burn. But I do not simply destroy. I transmute. The wood becomes heat, becomes light, becomes ash, which feeds the soil, which grows new wood. I am the engine of the cycle itself. You are a mirror hanging in a vacuum, reflecting nothing, forever. Sterile. Eternal, yes. But pointless."

She stepped closer, the heat of her now so intense it was beginning to cause the outermost layers of his crystalline form to sublimate, turning directly from solid light into a faint, glowing mist.

"You speak of sustainability, but you are the embodiment of stagnation. You are the light that feared its own shadow, that fled from the heat it could generate. You chose this... stillness..." she spat the word, "...because you were afraid of the chaos of life. You retreated into cold, hard fact because the messy, beautiful, painful reality of becoming was too terrifying for you. Don’t speak to me of sustainability. Your eternity is a coward’s eternity. A desert of facts without a single flower of meaning."

For the first time, a flicker passed through the Old Light’s featureless face. A minute ripple, a flaw in the perfect plane. It was the equivalent of a flinch. She had struck not at his logic, but at his motive. She was implying a choice, a failing, an emotion—fear—in a being that claimed to be above such things.

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