The Primordial Record novel Chapter 1787

Chapter 1787: Rowan

Eva’s presence called attention like nothing else, and it was because she held the power of a Primordial while still holding the warmth of a mother’s embrace. It was like a mortal looking directly into the sun and still not fearing it would hurt their eyes.

"You are gathered here," her voice rang out, amplified by Algorth’s ancient power, "because you are confused, but you should not. Centuries ago, you saw the changes across Reality, and you heard my voice about the dawn of a new age. You have all seen a division in the fundamental nature of things. You wonder which path is true. Which light is real?"

She looked directly at the faction of the Old Light, at the Celestial Creators and their Angels who still followed the path of Primordial Light despite the changes they had all felt in their dominion. She spoke to them, but her words carried to all, "My father offered you a cold, hard truth. And there is a place for that truth. But he offered it without purpose. Without love. Without growth. He offered you a perfect, eternal engine that goes nowhere."

She spread her arms, encompassing the entire congress. "Everyone here has suffered the same fate! Your path ahead had been severed, your destiny halted. Every Old One has seen the glimpse of true power, and they know what has been given to them is far from their true Destiny. Now, I offer you a journey! I offer you meaning! I offer you a light that does not just reveal what is, but helps create what could be! But I see that some of you remain... unconvinced. You cling to the sterile past out of fear of the living future. So be it. I will not waste my light trying to illuminate eyes that refuse to see. This Reality is on its last age, and its killers are being worshiped as kings... no more will this be allowed to stand. I will show you the foundation for change."

What she was speaking of was madness, but her power compelled all to listen. Even the Primordials were not stopping her words from flowing, and the New Light did not flinch under the weight of their regard.

Eva’s tone changed, dropping into a register of terrifying solemnity. "Instead, I will show you the foundation upon which all truths, all lights, all possibilities ultimately rest. I will show you the weight of reality."

She raised her hands high above her head. The light around her intensified, not spreading out, but shooting upwards in a single, coherent beam of immense power. It struck the very top of Algorth’s highest spire.

The Living Castle shuddered. Its stone flanks groaned. The molten silver in its windows bubbled and boiled over. The spire began to glow, its substance becoming translucent, then transparent, then vanishing altogether, transforming into a lens, a gateway, a focusing apparatus of unimaginable scale and complexity.

Eva was not summoning a being. She was using Algorth as a metaphysical amplifier, a divine trebuchet, to launch a call across the multi-layered membranes of existence, into the deepest, most silent voids between the voids.

The beam from her hands was a message. A name. A title. An invitation.

A single, echoing syllable that was felt more than heard:

"ROWAN."

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The effect of this call was instantaneous.

The Arena, which had withstood the sort of power that could end all creation inside this Reality, trembled. The plain of solidified light developed a hairline fracture that shot from one horizon to the other.

On a billion billion worlds across every dimension, every pendulum stopped dead in its swing.

Every star in every universe—the red giants, the white dwarfs, the yellow suns, the nascent protostars—flickered. Just once. As if something had walked over their grave.

A silence deeper than any silence fell upon the Arena. The kind of silence that is not an absence of sound, but the presence of something that consumes sound.

The hum of Algorth was gone. The whispered thoughts of the immortals were silenced. Even the internal hum of their own power seemed muted, stifled.

Then, a pressure.

It began as a feeling of profound density, as if the very air was turning to lead. Then it was the feeling of being at the bottom of a cosmic ocean, with the weight of all its water pressing down. Then it was more.

The entire audience, countless billions of immortals whose powers had shaken creation, were pressed to the ground, their thoughts squeezed nearly to nothing, and only the awareness that this pressure was not focused on them kept them alive and sane.

The Primordials themselves took a step back. A collective, unheard gasp.

They weren’t just feeling the pressure. Reality itself was being compressed. The infinite Arena seemed to be shrinking, its vastness bowing inward around a single, specific point before Algorth. It was as if the gravity that this presence carried was so great that everything had to bow before it.

Space twisted. Time stuttered. The laws of physics, which were merely the jokes Primordials told each other, began to weep and break.

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