The Primordial Record novel Chapter 1785

Chapter 1785: The End of Infinity

The pale man did not struggle as Rowan reached him.

He should have, but he did not. The fight, the flight, the desperate bargains—all of it had bled out of him, leaving behind a shell of absolute comprehension.

Eldrithor knelt on the cold, black volcanic rock, the rough texture biting into his bony knees. His head was bowed, not in submission, but in a final, exhausted acknowledgment of the geometry of his fate, knowing that the altar before him was not just stone; it was a destination.

’How could my end be like this?’

He could feel the silent, screaming resonance of Primordial Soul’s unmaking soaking the air, a psychic patina of absolute violation that made his new, fragile form want to vomit. This was the place. There would be no other. This was a place where Primordials were butchered.

Rowan’s shadow fell over him, not blocking a light source, but imposing a deeper darkness upon the gloom. He did not speak. Words were for beings who dealt in possibilities. Here, there was only the inevitable. Eldrithor wished he had; perhaps it might have reduced the fear in his heart, but Rowan was silent.

A long, pale, trembling finger reached out and touched the edge of the altar. The man who was Chaos flinched from the memory imprinted in the stone. It was a memory of screaming. Not a sound, but the idea of a sound being erased.

He knew what was coming. The knowledge was a cold stone in his gut. The hammer. The simple, brutal, final tool. The blade Rowan used on his immortal flesh was for precise unmaking, for the severing of concepts. This... this was for something else.

This was for punishment. This was for annihilation of the physical vessel with a brutality that echoed through every level of being.

With a strength that seemed to leech the last warmth from the void, Rowan’s hands closed around the pale man’s upper arms. The grip was not fierce; it was inexorable, like the closing of a tectonic plate. He was lifted with an ease that was itself a form of contempt. This infinite being, now, weighed so little.

He was laid upon the altar. The black stone was freezing against his back, a cold that seeped into his spine and seemed to drink the feeble heat of his stolen life.

The rough-hewn surface scraped his skin raw, and Eldrithor felt goosebumps on his skin. He stared up at the formless, twilight-grey void that served as a sky in this non-place. His star-and-void eyes were wide, unblinking, seeing not the emptiness above but the terrifying certainty of the figure standing over him.

Rowan looked down on Primordial Chaos before a black helm snapped shut over his face, leaving only his eyes open, and then he picked up the hammer.

It was heavier than a mountain and as light as a thought. The pitted iron head seemed to suck in the faint light, a promise of impact. The dark wood of the haft was smooth from use.

There was no wind-up. No dramatic pause. There was only the efficient, economic motion of a craftsman beginning his work.

The hammer fell.

It struck the pale man’s right kneecap.

The sound was not a crack. It was a wet, thick, pulverizing crunch, a sickeningly intimate noise of calcium and cartilage being reduced to paste under infinite pressure. 𝙛𝓻𝒆𝒆𝒘𝙚𝓫𝙣𝙤𝒗𝙚𝓵.𝙘𝙤𝙢

"BOOM – CRUNCH."

The pale man’s body did not just jerk; it convulsed, a violent, electric spasm of agony that arched his back off the cold stone. A sound was ripped from his throat—a high, thin, breathless shriek that was utterly, pathetically mortal.

Primordial Chaos had loved pain, but this was a pain in an immortal body that knew no limits and could not end, here this pain was final and there was nothing to shield his mind from the inevitability of his eventual fate.

The pain was a white-hot supernova in his nervous system, so vast and all-consuming it felt like his entire being had been compressed into that one, shattered point.

He did not want to, but he looked down, his vision swimming, and saw the ruin of his knee. It was no longer a joint. It was a crater of meat and splintered bone, a grotesque blossom of crimson that seemed obscenely bright against the monochrome grey and black of the landscape. The leg was bent at an impossible angle, the foot twitching spastically.

A dull moan emerged from his throat at this moment, and he did not even know he was making it.

But he did not pass out. His form, though frail, was still woven from the essence of a Primordial. His biology, his very capacity to experience, was not human. He could not escape into unconsciousness. His mind was built to process the birth and death of Realities; it could process, catalog, and endure this agony with terrifying clarity. He was condemned to feel every infinite second of it.

Rowan watched Eldrithor, his expression hidden behind his helm, but his stance was that of a stone monolith. He raised the hammer again.

The second blow came down on the left elbow.

This time, the sound was sharper, a SNAP-POP as the joint hyperextended and then exploded outward.

The bone, the ulna, splintered and tore through the fish-belly white skin, a jagged, bloody spear of ivory. The arm flopped, useless, connected by strands of torn tendon and muscle that writhed like dying worms. The pale man’s shriek escalated into a continuous, breathless keen, a sound of pure, undiluted sensory overload.

When he had killed Primordial Soul on this altar, he had been frenzied and filled with wrath, making his hammer blows to seek her death in an efficient manner.

At that time, he had not processed his loss, and his heart was still filled with fire, but now that his mind was calm, his vengeance was cold.

For the beings who treated all life as disposable trash, their karma was him holding this hammer.

Primordial Soul died first, and she was the lucky one.

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Rowan worked with a dreadful, methodical pace. He was not enraged. He was not frenzied. He was a sculptor of pain, an architect of ruin.

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