Chapter 1783: Breaking A Primordial
Trapped in a body that was a prison, fighting in a realm that hated him slightly less than it hated his opponent, and facing a weapon that was his absolute antithesis. Chaos’s attacks were wild, world-ending, and inefficient. Rowan’s were precise, absolute, and fatal.
Rowan ran along the spine of a mountain range that was trying to crush him. He dodged a rain of stars that burned with the heat of betrayal. He weaved through a forest of grasping limbs that sang songs of madness. He was a paradox himself: the epicenter of a storm of annihilation, yet the calmest, most focused point in the cosmos.
He found a weak point—a vast, pulsing organ that seemed to be regulating the Primordial’s desperate hold on its newly ordered form. It was a heart of chaos, trying to beat in a rhythm. A profound vulnerability.
Rowan did not hesitate as he raised Anathema for a final, decisive thrust, disregarding the shriek of disbelief from the Primordial.
He felt a profound pulse erupt from Primordial Chaos, so powerful that the entirety of Oblivion seemed to grind to a halt, as ephemeral cracks appeared and disappeared. This amount of power released by Chaos even shocked Rowan.
His blade was halted an inch from piercing the heart of Chaos as the landscape around him dissolved not into an attack, but into an image. A memory, rendered in perfect, soul-rending detail.
He stood not on grey ash, but on green grass. The air smelled of woodsmoke and baking bread. Looking down, he could see Andar, Maeve, Diane, Lost, Circe, Vraegar, and Staff. His Angels surrounded them in mortal bodies as they organized a small feast.
The childish laughter of Lost as he was picked up by Staff and tickled cut through the air and into Rowan’s heart like a knife, and smelling a familiar fragrance, he looked to the side to see Eva, who was not the personification of Light, just his Lady of Shadow.
She glanced at him before looking away, a smile in her eyes. There and then, Rowan knew she loved him, not because of his power or beauty, but because she had made the choice. Eva knew that Rowan would not stop for anyone, and so she was quiet, satisfied to be at his side.
In his memories, Rowan did not say anything, and now he also did not; he just looked at her like he had never seen her face before.
It was a perfect illusion. A moment of peace before the storm. A gift and a torment from the master of maybes.
"THIS IS WHAT I TOOK FROM YOU," Chaos’s voice whispered, not as a roar, but as the sighing wind. "I CAN GIVE IT BACK. STOP THIS. TURN BACK. AND I WILL WEAVE A REALITY FOR YOU WHERE NONE OF IT EVER HAPPENED. YOU CAN HAVE THEM BACK. YOU CAN HAVE YOUR PEACE."
Rowan stopped. He looked at Eva’s face, alive with joy. He saw the smoke rising from the fire and smelled the fragrance of mortal food. He felt the pull of it, the deep, ancient ache that had driven him for millennia. It was a perfect trap, crafted from his own deepest desire. One he always thought was lost, but always returned in the end.
He looked at the illusion, and for a moment, the cold mask slipped, not with grief, but with pity.
"You still don’t understand," he said, his voice soft, almost gentle. "This peace you show me... It’s built on a foundation of your chaos. It’s a lie. And a life built on a lie is just a slower form of Oblivion."
He waved his hand, and his mother appeared, Elura. She smiled at him, and Rowan looked directly at her without flinching. "I do not fight for what was lost. I fight so that others may have what I lost. And that requires a world without you and your kind."
The love in his heart did not make him weak. It was the reason for his strength. It was the fuel for the fire that had burned away everything but his purpose.
He saw through the illusion. He saw the pulsing, terrified organ beneath the image of his childhood home.
He did not hesitate.
Anathema plunged down.
The image of this place shattered like glass. The scream of Primordial Chaos was not one of pain, but of ultimate realization. The final, desperate gamble had failed. There was no trick left, no maybes, no chance.
There was only the cold, certain, and inevitable end.
The blade pierced the heart of chaos. And began to unmake it.
The unmaking was not a swift process. Anathema’s work was meticulous, a careful and absolute deletion of cosmic code. Where the blade had pierced the heart of Chaos, a spreading stain of absolute grey bloomed, a stillness that was anathema to the very concept of the Primordial. It was a null-cancer, eating him from the inside out.
The continent-sized form convulsed, mountains of solidified chance crumbling into inert dust, rivers of frozen time evaporating into silent nothing. The thousands of eyes winked out, not in a blink, but in a final, desperate squeeze before being erased from the record of existence. The roar of the Primordial diminished into a high, thin shriek—the sound of infinity being forced through a pinhole.
He was losing cohesion, his hard-won, ordered form beginning to destabilize under the onslaught of Rowan’s will and Oblivion’s relentless hunger. To remain in that vast, vulnerable state was to be a stationary target, a canvas for Rowan’s brush of annihilation.
In a final, breathtaking act of paradoxical will, Primordial Chaos rebelled against his own rebellion. To survive, he had imposed order. To survive now, he had to shatter that order and become something else entirely. He had to become small. He had to become specific. He had to become something that could run.
The massive form imploded. It was not an explosion of energy, but a violent, inward compression. The crumbling mountains, the dying eyes, the screaming mouths—all of it was sucked into a single, infinitesimal point. The silence of the Ashen Shore was broken by a sound like the universe taking a final, ragged breath.
And then, standing where the heart of the storm had been, was a man.
He was pale, so pale he seemed to glow against the monotonous grey of Oblivion. It was not the pale of moonlight or marble, but the sickly, bloodless white of a creature that had never seen the sun, a deep-sea fish pulled from the abyssal trenches into the blinding air. His skin had a faint, slippery sheen, as if still remembering a form that was fluid and vast. He was naked, shivering, his limbs thin and strangely jointed, lacking the muscle memory for this crude, bipedal configuration. His hair was a shock of pure white, plastered to a high, domed forehead.
But his eyes were the most horrifying thing. They were the last vestiges of his true nature. They were not human eyes. They were windows into the storm. One swirled with the nascent light of a billion unborn stars; the other churned with the absolute black of a billion dead ones. In them swirled a terror so profound, so ancient, that it would have unmade a lesser mind to behold it.
This pathetic, shivering figure was the end result of infinite chaos forced into a singular, desperate shape: a creature that could beg.
He clutched at his chest, where the grey stain of Anathema’s wound was now a smaller, darker blemish against his fish-belly white skin, still slowly spreading. He gasped, his new lungs struggling with the concept of air in a place that had none. He took a stumbling step backward, his feet sinking into the ash, which now seemed to cling to him with a newfound hunger, as if recognizing a more digestible form.
"No..." The word was a croak, a pathetic sound from a throat never meant for language. It was the first word he had ever spoken that was not a declaration, a threat, or a roar. It was a plea. "Please... no more."
Rowan watched, Anathema held loosely at his side. He observed the transformation without surprise, without disgust, without pity. It was a logical, desperate maneuver. A cornered animal will chew off its own leg to escape a trap. Chaos had chewed off his own infinity to escape the blade, trapping himself in a smaller, more fragile prison, but one with the illusion of mobility.
"You cannot..." the pale man gasped, holding up a trembling hand. The gesture was strangely human, learned from a million mortal deaths he had witnessed or caused. "You do not know... what you are doing. The balance... without me... without us..."
"The balance is meaningless," Rowan said, his voice the same flat, reality-imposing tone. "I am not preserving the balance. I am ending the war."
"It will not be an end!" Chaos shrieked, his voice cracking. The sound was small and lost in the vast grey. "It will be a stagnation! A slow, cold death for all that is! I am the catalyst! I am the fire! You would leave the cosmos a stillborn corpse!"
"I would leave it in the hands of those who live within it," Rowan replied, taking a single, deliberate step forward. "Not those who use it as a battlefield."
The step was not aggressive. It was inevitable. It was the ticking of a clock. To the Primordial-turned-man, it was the step of the headsman on the scaffold.
Terror, pure and undiluted, overrode the last vestiges of his pride. The concept of running, so foreign to a being who had once been places rather than traveled to them, seized his new form. He turned, his movements jerky and uncoordinated, and fled.