The Primordial Record novel Chapter 1784

Chapter 1784: The Silence Before The End

Eldrithor, The Whispering Abyss, known to many Realities as Primordial Chaos, was fleeing, and it was ugly, lacking any grace that an immortal being should have.

It was not a run of speed, but of desperation. His feet, pale and long-toed, kicked up puffs of grey ash that stuck to his damp skin.

He ran with the frantic, stumbling gait of a nightmare, constantly looking back over his shoulder, his star-and-void eyes wide with a panic that was utterly new to him.

He was Primordial Chaos, the architect of randomness, the author of accident, and he was running in a straight line because his new, simple mind could not conceive of anything else. The irony was absolute.

Rowan followed. He did not run. He walked. A steady, relentless pace. A force of nature following a failing one.

The distance between them closed not with sprinting speed, but with the grim certainty of gravity. Each of Rowan’s measured, powerful steps covered ground that the shambling, terrified figure struggled to gain.

The Ashen Shore stretched on forever, a wasteland of forgotten potential. There were features in the gloom—the skeletal remains of concepts that had wandered too close to the Gate and died, frozen waves of abandoned time, the vast, crumbling arches of laws that had been repealed at the dawn of creation. It was a graveyard for ideas that had all been forgotten.

If any immortal could enter this place and survive, then the wealth of knowledge and power they would gain would be incalculable, but for the two beings here, all of this knowledge was nothing; they had accumulated more than this, and still yet, the language that ruled over both of them was primal.

The null-field was taking its toll on the fugitive. His stolen form was not built to last. The ash sapped his strength, each footfall costing him more than the last. The airless void starved his new lungs. The wound in his chest, the spreading grey stain of Anathema, pulsed with a cold that was leaching the warmth from his stolen vitality.

His breath came in ragged, useless sobs. His pale skin was sheened with a sweat that was immediately absorbed by the thirsty dust. Rowan could feel Chaos trying to push his way into space, disregarding his control over Chaos, and he slowly showed him the error of his ways by ripping the Origin of Space away from his weak fingers.

"Mercy!" Chaos screamed, the word tearing from his throat. It was a concept he had never embodied, only witnessed from the outside as a fascinating, flawed mortal weakness. Now he clothed himself in it. "I yield! I abdicate! I will... I will leave! I will go into the deep void of

Limbo and never return! You will never hear my name again!"

Rowan said nothing. His silence was more terrible than any rebuttal. It was the silence of the executioner who had heard all the pleas before and knew they changed nothing.

"I can give you things!" Chaos cried, tripping over a half-buried spine of a dead metaphor and sprawling into the ash. He scrambled backward on his hands and knees, his form now caked in grey, like a corpse being prepared for burial. "Power! Knowledge! The secrets of creation itself! The true name of the First Creator! I can make you like him! A true divinity, not just a killer of them!"

Rowan kept walking. The offers were the rustling of leaves in a hurricane—meaningless noise.

"What do you want?" the Primordial wept, the starlight in his left eye guttering like a dying candle. "What can I possibly give you that will stay your hand? Tell me! Name it!"

Finally, Rowan spoke, his voice cutting through the pleas like a knife. "I want you to understand."

The words held a finality that stole the breath from Chaos’s lungs. There was no bargain to be made. There was only the lesson. And the lesson ended in death.

Despair, colder than the ash, colder than Oblivion itself, seized him. He clawed his way to his feet and ran again, driven by an instinct he didn’t know he possessed. He was no longer Primordial Chaos, the fundamental force. He was prey.

Rowan, like an unforgiven specter, followed.

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He felt her screams.

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