The Primordial Record

Chapter 1716: The Slow Unraveling

Rowan roared, not in pain, but in ecstatic challenge. Pushing power into his Incarnation to fight against the last outburst from Primordial Soul. The power of his soul was not enough, and so, pushing deep into his physique as an Apex Omniversal Titan, he activated his Final Form.

He felt something break inside of him; his body was not yet ready to unleash such powers, but this battle was a whetstone pushing him to heights that were unknown. Logically, he should have completed all of his Origins, upgraded his Class, and perhaps done a final fusion to be able to fully activate his Final Form, but Rowan was learning how to manipulate higher-dimensional complexities far better than he could have ever imagined as this battle continued.

A wave of shadow and pure, unfiltered power poured from his Reality Crown towards Rowan’s body, and his form began to expand. Numerous mysteries were born and perished inside of him. Entire universes filled with alien lifeforms that lived and died over the span of a thousand Eras emerged in his heart, and when it seemed that his body was about to reach an unknown peak, his foundation crumbled.

Like attempting to carry a mountain when his legs were made from matchsticks, Rowan could barely hold his Final Form for a moment. Yet, in that single moment, he had regained his dimensional soul from nothing, breaking the curse of Realm’s Butcher, and his body had been brought to the peak.

This was Rowan’s cruelest weapon, copying Primordial Soul, who could feed on Origin to regain her life; Rowan could feed on himself to be reborn.

’But if Origins come from Realities, could it not be said that the Primordials are borrowing our unique talents to be reborn?’ Rowan mused internally before pouring power into his Incarnation.

The majority of the abilities he was using in this battle were untried and extremely dangerous if he made a single misstep. Using the Incarnation, Rowan had a buffer and the freedom to go crazy with his speculations, and knowing that any backlash that may arise from his mistakes would have to travel through his Incarnation before reaching him.

Rowan could not tell what would happen to him if he created an Anti-Core inside his body, or accepted the entirety of a Primordial in his flesh so he could cage them, even grafting a tentacle from the shed vitality of Primordial Soul.

With his incarnation, he did not have to hesitate; he could explode with his entire focus and not fear failure.

And that was what he did, and in a single stroke, he nearly emptied his infinite power into the body of the Incarnation.

The grafted Nightmare tendril convulsed as the swirling vortex in the chest of the Incarnation pulsed, and from its depths, not nothingness, but the echo of the first negation, the memory of uncreation, surged forth. It met Primordial Soul’s lance of identity.

The collision was silent. Utterly, profoundly silent. Light and void canceled each other. Then, the entire Origin Land screamed as it shrank. To withstand this clash that would have ended Reality a thousand times over, ten percent of the Origin Land was lost.

Yet from this destruction, Rowan saw enlightenment, and he channeled that destruction into his palm, creating a disk, and in this moment, Rowan knew that he had not just attained the Will of Destruction, he had also gained its Origin alongside it!

Truly, the best environment for him to grow was in battle.

At this time, Primordial Soul was resisting the Incarnation with everything she had when her eyes turned to Rowan, followed by her head, she looked at the swirling disks, and her face transformed into that of Elura.

“My son, there is much you do not know of the…”

Rowan crushed the disk, releasing a beam of Desteuction Origin at the Primordial as he growled, “I know enough.”

Its beam rippled outwards, piercing through Primordial Soul’s face like a hot knife through snow. Not destroying her, but unraveling her. The dreams of souls began to fray at the edges. Individual threads – lives, memories, essences – started to slip from the weave.

They didn’t die; they dispersed, like smoke in a hurricane, dissolving into the chaotic energies of annihilation or simply vanishing into the indifferent void.

The mosaic of her face shattered, the expressions freezing in the final moments of terror, confusion, or sorrow before dissolving. Her form, once a defined absence, began to blur, to lose cohesion. Patches of her simply… ceased to hold together, dissolving into motes of faint, dying light that were instantly snuffed out by Rowan’s radiating aura of violent negation.

The Incarnation, seeing the state of the Primordial, laughed like a maniac and charged towards her before slamming into her body, the poison of his Anti-Core traveling deep into the struggling Titans, whose screams could unravel existence.

She tried to pull back and coalesce, but the Revenant Incarantion would not let her escape, burning all of its life force to keep the corruption within her form.

No longer needing to he bound in the form of Rowan, the Incarnation transformed into a great beast that fused the form of all three Primordial Beasts that Rowan presently controlled.

A chaotic array of claws, fangs, wings, tails, scales, and all manner of beastly monstrosity sprouted inside her flesh, infecting her core and cracking the soul-stuff beneath. The gnashing mouths bit into her own substance, consuming the trapped souls nearby.

The Primordial’s core-heart, already fissured, pulsed erratically, shedding great chunks of solidified emotion that shattered like glass when they hit the scab-crust below that had spread for nearly half the Origin Land, releasing clouds of anguished mist.

The Origin Land was dying to contain the battle between Rowan and Primordial Soul, but it was worth it, Rowan believed.

Finally, the struggle ended, the Incarnation perished, and Primordial Soul’s flickering body collapsed on her knees; she had no more Origin to burn.

Rowan advanced. He wasn’t triumphant; he was consummate. This was his purpose, refined to its purest, most horrific expression. Rowan was not aware, but during the battle, he had begun to call upon powers of the Enochian Cradle, because upon gaining the Origin of Destruction, a passage to that power seemed to have solidified inside his consciousness, becoming a part of him.

Pouring destruction down his hand, he lashed out, wrapping around the Primordial’s flickering torso. Where he touched, her form rotted.

Not decayed in a biological sense, but conceptually decomposed.

Hope became maggot-ridden cynicism.

Love curdled into possessive obsession.

Joy crumbled into hysterical ash.

The souls trapped within these rotting sections didn’t scream; they warped, their essences twisting into shrieking parodies of themselves before dissolving into his hand, feeding its chaotic power.

Primordial Soul’s body flashed and took the form of Maeve. Her eyes filled with terror and despair, she slowly raised a hand—a gesture that might have been defiance, pleading, or simply the final spasm of a dying concept.

Rowan seized it. His massive fingers closed around her wrist. Her form was insubstantial, yet he held it with impossible force; there was a weird form of gentleness in his grip.

A slight bit of hope bled through the eyes of Maeve, and then Rowan pulled.

It wasn’t physical. He pulled on the thread of her existence. The fundamental cord that bound the Primordial of Soul together.

And it gave, not with a snap, but with a terrible, slow, unraveling.

®

The final moments were not loud, but profoundly, cosmically quiet. Primordial Soul didn’t explode. She dissipated. Like smoke caught in a sudden, absolute vacuum.

Her Fate and Destiny unwound, thread by agonizing thread. Each soul, released from the binding weave that had kept them trapped for countless Eras, experienced a microsecond of pure, terrifying individuality – a flash of their life, their love, their fear – before winking out into absolute, unremembered nothingness.

Their mosaic faces dissolved into faint afterimages, then gone as the core-heart within every soul gave one final, feeble pulse, a dying ember, then shattered into a cloud of iridescent dust that hung for a moment, beautiful and terrible, before being sucked into the hungry vortex of Rowan’s chest.

The last to go was the concept itself – the Primordial essence. It didn’t fight. It simply… ceased to be bound.

A sigh echoed across the Origin Land, not of defeat but of release, of a terrible burden finally laid down. The sigh of the last soul realizing oblivion is peace. Then, silence—a silence deeper than the void between Realities.

A silence that hurt.

Rowan stood alone amidst the ravaged scab-crust of his Origin Land.