Chapter 1781: The Ashen Shore of Oblivion
Inside Rowan’s consciousness were countless spots of light representing all the places of interest he was focusing on. Among these spots of lights were twelve extremely large spots, all of which coincided with Primordial level tasks, and above these twelve light spots were four larger spots of light, which represented what Rowan considered to be issues greater than the present Primordials inside this Reality.
They were the Beast of Final Rest, which was Death, Eosah, and her knowledge of the fifth level beyond Origin, the mysterious First Creator, Enoch, and... himself paired with the Primordial Record.
His primary focus, however, was on one of the spots of Primordial interest... Chaos. He reviewed the series of events that led to the imprisonment of Chaos inside Oblivion, and when he was satisfied that he had missed nothing, his main body began to rise... it was time to kill another Primordial.
Rowan reviewed the tools he had to work with and checked his weapons and Origins. Before his body vanished from the Origin Lands, he began to create a new blade inside his heart, one that was specifically made to kill Chaos.
His body began to transform, as his armor and flesh were subtly evolving and changing in a direction that would suit the battle ahead. His new talents were extremely powerful, and as an Omniversal Titan, he was not restricted to a single form of combat.
The Primordials left in Reality were dangerous, but this was his chance to learn and refine all of his combat methodologies in order to properly deal with the threats outside this Reality.
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Oblivion was infinite, and even though Rowan had pushed Primordial Chaos through its gate, if he had no method to track the Primordial, then he would have to search Oblivion for an eternity before he discovered Chaos.
Obviously, Rowan would not allow such an oversight to happen, as he easily tracked the Primordial with the connection he had with the Origin of Space.
Primordial Chaos had mastered two layers of the Origin of Space, but Rowan had mastered four layers, and if not for the fact that he had not yet seeded his this Origin in his flesh, Rowan would have already been on his way into becoming the Primordial of Space.
By now, he could call himself a Nascent Primordial of Space, Destruction, Fate, Soul, and Destiny. Still, preparations needed to be made, Primordials needed to be killed before he took the last step.
Rowan could feel his connection with Chaos, and if he wanted, he could seize back the minor Authority that the Primordial had over space, ensuring that Reality did not collapse when he was killed, but that would be a mistake at this point; he did not want Chaos to know he had this power.
He would rather leave a road open for Chaos to escape when death came for him, and if the Primordial chose to escape using his power over Space, thinking his salvation lay there, then Rowan would strike.
Feeling the completion of the weapon inside his heart, Rowan stepped into oblivion.
The transition into Oblivion was not a fall, but an un-making of the fall itself. Rowan did not descend; the concept of "descent" was systematically erased around him.
One moment, he was at the precipice of the Gate; the next, he was... elsewhere. Elsewhere was not a place. It was the absence of place, the corpse of location.
He was in the fourth layer of the void, in a location that he called the Ashen Shore of Oblivion. Rowan looked around, his massive consciousness taking in this layer of the void at a glance.
It was a plane of absolute grey, a fine, static dust that was not matter but the memory of matter. Underfoot, it had the consistency of crushed possibilities.
There was no sky, no horizon, only a perpetual, twilight gloom that seemed to emanate from the dust itself. The air—though there was no air—was thick with the silence of forgotten things.
Sound did not echo here; it was absorbed, its very vibrational nature questioned and nullified. The laws of physics were not broken; they were deceased. Time was a sluggish, dying river, meandering toward a sea that had evaporated eons ago.
Rowan’s senses, attuned to the fundamental frequencies of existence, screamed in protest. He was an intruder in a realm that had voted against being. However, the portion of Space Origin in his body yearned to consume this emptiness, but Rowan held this hunger at bay.
Every particle of his armor, every strand of his will, was under constant, gentle, inexorable assault both from inside himself as he suppressed his hunger and outside from Oblivion.
Oblivion did not attack; it merely insisted that he, like all things, was a temporary error in the eternal equation of nothing. To remain here, whole and defined, required an act of continuous, monumental defiance.
He had expected this. His armor, forged in the death throes of a dimension, was a suit of existential defiance. His will, hardened by the un-making of a Primordial, was a fortress against the null. He was a razor blade of "is" floating in an ocean of "is-not."
And he was not alone.
A thousand miles away, in the absolute scale of this non-place, a storm was dying.
It was Primordial Chaos. But the infinite, galaxy-spanning storm of potentiality was gone. What remained was a shrunken, desperate thing. A core of screaming energy, perhaps a few thousand miles in diameter, convulsing upon the ashen plain. It was like watching a sun drown in tar.
Oblivion’s null-field was doing its work. It was un-creating him. But Chaos was not succumbing passively. Rowan watched, his perception piercing the gloom, and saw the terrifying truth. The Primordial was not merely resisting; he was adapting. To survive here, even for a moment, he was forced to violate his own fundamental nature.
Primordial Chaos was not willing to be suppressed, and he was carving out his flesh to adapt to Oblivion.
Chaos was the lord of the unformed, the king of infinite maybe. But to exist in a realm that rejected existence itself, he had to become something else. He had to become defined. He had to impose limits upon his own limitless being. To avoid being unmade by the outside nothing, he was making himself less from the inside.
It was a horrific, paradoxical evolution. Rowan saw the storm coalesce, its wild energy compressing into harder, more solid forms. The lightning of chance became structured, arcing in predictable, painful patterns.
The swirling nebulae of possibility crystallized into jagged, painful-looking geography—mountains of solidified chance, rivers of frozen probability. The billion eyes of nascent stars dimmed, their light focusing into a few hundred thousand desperate, intelligent points of awareness.
He was trading his infinite, chaotic power for a finite, ordered stability. He was becoming mortal in the most literal sense: subject to limitation, and thus, to death.
The process was agony. The screams of the Primordial were not of pain, but of existential violation. Each compression, each newly formed law he imposed upon himself, was a self-inflicted wound. His infinite body, sacrificed for a form that could endure the null-field, shrank until it was a landscape of torment, a continent of anguish writhing on the grey dust.
This was the moment. This was why Rowan had come. A weakened Primordial was a vulnerable Primordial. But a Primordial forced to weaken itself to survive was a creature in its death throes.
Rowan began to walk. His footsteps did not crunch on the ash; they imposed the concept of "footstep" upon a substance that rejected all concepts. Each step was a tiny victory of reality over unreality.
He stood before the living wound that was Primordial Chaos. The transformed entity was a terrible sight. It was no longer a formless storm, but a grotesque, shifting landmass of semi-solidified chaos.
Parts of it were like obsidian, glassy and sharp, reflecting a reality that wasn’t there. Other parts were fleshy and raw, pulsing with sickly light. Hundreds of thousands of eyes, each the size of a city, opened and closed across its surface, all focusing on the lone, armored figure standing before it.
In his right hand, Rowan manifested the weapon he had created just to kill Primordial Chaos; he called it Anathema. A fusion of his Destroyer and the death cries of Primordial Soul... it held not just the concept of annihilation but also the assured end of a Primordial.
Here, in this place, the blade seemed even more potent. It was a shard of absolute "is" in a universe of "is-not." It hummed with a quiet eagerness.
A mouth formed on the landscape before Rowan—a vast rift in the obsidian flesh, lined with teeth made of shattered timelines and frozen paradoxes.
"YOU." The voice was a seismic rumble, but it was diminished. It no longer shook the foundations of reality because there were no foundations to shake. Here, it was just sound, pathetic, and strained. "YOU HAVE DONE THIS."
"You did it to yourself," Rowan’s voice was flat, a statement of fact that cut through the oppressive silence. "You chained yourself to the door. I merely turned the key."
"YOU TRICKED ME! I WAS THE GUARDIAN! I HELD THE LINE AGAINST THE HUNGER OF THE PRIMORDIALS!" Spittle flew from the gigantic maw, each droplet a miniature big bang that flickered and died before it hit the grey dust, consumed by the null-field.
"The line was against a ghost," Rowan said, his gaze unwavering. "The war was already over. You were guarding an empty fortress while the true enemy walked through the front gate."
The multitude of eyes blinked in a wave of confusion and rage. "ENEMY? YOU DARE NAME ME ENEMY? I AM THE CLAY! I AM THE RAW STUFF FROM WHICH ALL THINGS ARE CARVED! WITHOUT ME, THERE IS ONLY STAGNATION! ONLY YOUR PATHETIC, ORDERED NOTHING!"
"And without the Sculptor, the clay is meaningless," Rowan replied, a cold, ancient anger beginning to simmer beneath his icy exterior. He was thinking of Nyxara, Primordial Soul, and all she had taken before she was killed, and venom entered his tone. "A nuisance. A mess that needs to be cleaned up."
The Primordial seemed to recoil, its rocky flesh grinding against itself. It had learned to use laughter, a harsh, cracking sound like continents breaking apart. "CLEANED UP? BY YOU? THE LITTLE REALITY WHO FASHIONS HIMSELF A BROOM? I KNOW YOU, ROWAN. I HAVE ALWAYS KNOWN YOU. I WAS THERE IN THE CHAOS OF YOUR BIRTH. I WAS THE STORM THAT RAGED THE NIGHT YOUR MOTHER SCREAMED AS WE ATE HER ALIVE. TELL ME ROWAN, HAVE YOU HEARD THE SOUND OF A REALITY SCREAMING?"
Rowan’s posture did not change, but the air around him grew colder. Oblivion itself seemed to hesitate.