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too close to the Gate and died, frozen waves of abandoned time, the vast, crumbling arches of laws that had been repealed at the dawn of creation.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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The strength of Eldrithor was almost gone. The grey stain on his chest had spread over his heart. His vision was darkening at the edges, the magnificent dual sights of creation and destruction narrowing to a tunnel focused only on the grey path ahead.
He stumbled over another rise, his body screaming in protest, and fell to his knees. He looked up, panting, his white hair matted with ash and the sweat of terror.
And he saw it.
Before him was a flat, circular expanse of black, volcanic-looking rock, a stark anomaly in the endless grey dust; it was not native to this place. It had been brought here. Imposed. At its center stood a simple, brutal structure: an altar.
It was carved from a single block of the same black stone, its lines severe and unforgiving. It was stained with shadows that seemed older than time. And lying beside it, on the dark rock, was a hammer.
It was a simple tool, its head a block of dull, pitted iron, its haft made of a wood so dark it seemed to drink the faint light. It was utterly mundane, and yet it radiated a aura of such final, absolute purpose that it made the pale man’s new heart stutter in his chest.
This was a place of ending. A specific ending.
And then, he felt it.
It was not a sound, not a smell, not a sight. It was a resonance—a ghost-echo in the very substance of reality. The altar and the hammer were not just objects; they were recording devices, and they had captured the signature of the event that had transpired here.
He felt her screams.
Not auditory screams, but the screams of concept, of essence, of identity being systematically taken apart. It was a psychic scar etched into the location itself. He felt the infinite creativity, the boundless potential for story and song and spirit, being methodically silenced. He felt the terror of the Sculptor realizing the clay had risen up not to be molded, but to shatter the hands that held it. He felt the moment of un-being, not as a cessation, but as an active, violent act of erasure.
It was the death scream of Primordial Soul.
And he knew, with a certainty that was the first and only true order he had ever known in his endless existence, that this was where Rowan had done it. This was the very spot where his eternal rival, his opposite, his reason for being, had been unmade.
The knowledge did not come to him as a thought. It was a physical blow. It doubled him over, retching nothing onto the black stone. The last of his strength fled. The fight went out of him. The desperate hope that had fueled his flight evaporated, leaving behind a hollow, aching certainty.
He was not just going to die.
He was going to be unmade. On this same stone. By the same hand. With the same tool.
His transformation had not been an escape. It had been a delivery system. He had not been running away; he had been running to his appointed end. He had been led, like a lamb to the slaughter, to the very altar where the concept of Primordial death had been invented.
He looked up, his star-and-void eyes wide with a horror that was now complete. He saw Rowan walking toward him, no faster, no slower. The relentless pace had never been about pursuit. It had been about procession.
The pale man, Primordial Chaos, did not beg again. He did not offer deals. He simply knelt on the black stone, before the altar stained with his sister’s essence, and looked at the approaching figure of his end.
He finally understood. This wasn’t vengeance, it wasn’t even justice; no, this was much simpler.
It was... ecology. He was an invasive species, a cancer on the cosmos, and Rowan was the cure. The cure was absolute, and it was merciless, and it had come for him. Why did he ever think he could escape it?
The running was over. All that was left was the acceptance. And the hammer.