The Primordial Record

Chapter 1811: Tumultuous Travels

Vyraak, the Dragon God, Scion of Time, should have been dead when the Primordials began to battle in the Hell forged Arena, but he wasn’t.

He had sat beside a peculiar group in silence, hidden under the cloak of his misery. The group, which consisted of a white dragon, whose depths were shrouded in fog, a fiery immortal with Phoenixes dancing around his body, two mages, and five unique beings whose souls had all the dynamic radiance of mortality, yet their lifelines were so long that it was equal to a higher-dimensional immortal.

The battle in the Arena had been extremely compelling, but Vyraak was among the few who were not focused on the fight between Telmus and the Titan; it was heated, sure, but there was still an element of performance about the whole affair that he could sense.

Clearly, his intuition was not sensed by others as they cheered like carrion brought to a feast of corpses. Vyraak’s hidden gaze, on the other hand, was focused on these mortals who called themselves Elythrii.

How could mortals have a lifespan of a higher-dimensional immortal? And why do I have a feeling that they are a part of this Reality, but also not?

Then Rowan came, and Vyraak fully experienced what it meant to be an ant in front of a collapsing sun.

Even before the dragon announced that they needed to flee, Vyraak was already moving. He had watched his entire universe collapse into war and madness, and he had been spending every moment of his life in combat and exploration; he knew when it was time to run.

However, he had overestimated his capabilities and underestimated the might of Primordials.

Vyraak was among the first to run for the exit points in the Arena, but when the stray bolt of power deflected from above wiped out a sizable chunk of the Arena, killing unknown billions, Vyraak had been at the fringes of the explosion and his flesh exploded from his body, leaving glowing bones behind that was rapidly turning to stone and ash under the annihilating power of a small strand of energy that fell from above.

Death came quickly for Vyraak, and of the many regrets he had, not knowing the root of the corruption he was pursuing, which hid itself deep inside his soul, was the greatest, followed by not taking revenge on all the Celestial and Demons who had crushed his universe.

The silence of death was not peaceful. It was filled with haunting specters of his homeworld who screamed at him and clawed at his sanity, screaming for absolution and vengeance.

His sanity was breaking, his ego on the edge of shattering when he saw the pale light of a moon shining in the distance, and like a drowning man, he reached for it. Vyraak thought he heard a familiar voice before the light of the moon overshadowed his consciousness.

“As much as your soul longs for rest, Vyraak, I still have need of you, but I do not take and not give in return. Dragon, Death cannot have you… not yet.”

Vyraak arose from death, screaming, holding his blade.

“As I crafted my first Source Treasure, in the two hundredth million years of my toils in the Nothingness, I made my thirty-first failure. I gave them no names, since I will not wield them. This is my gift to you. Now, rise Vyraak, in my presence, Death is not your portion.”

These words were familiar, but Vyraak would swear that he had never heard them before. Yet there was one thing that held his sanity in place and allowed him to focus: his blade, the Red Moonlight Blade.

It gleamed bright with the color of moonlight, but overhead, a red moon appeared as a massive red eye stretched open on Vyraak’s chest.

Lazily swinging the blade to the side, the red moon overhead fell down with a scream, tearing a hole through space and time, disregarding the powerful restriction imposed on a primordial domain.

Not glancing at the chaos around him, Vyraak entered the tear in space and time, and he escaped this doomed place.

®

His journey across space and time went by in a haze; after all, the journey had been through a wound that he had cut through with brute force that would definitely leave scars.

Vyraak, the Dragon God, did not fly through space and time so much as he was vomited through it. The majestic, humanoid-scaled leviathan, who had once challenged entire Hosts of Angels and Demons, was reduced to a battered figure, his wings torn, his scales dulled by the metaphysical ash of the Arena’s death.

His flight was not navigated. It was a blind, panicked stumble through the screaming corridors of dying dimensions. His one guiding light was his sword.

He saw dimensions bleeding into one another, heard the echoes of civilizations snuffed out in the backlash of a battle they could never comprehend. He was a leaf in a hurricane, battered by waves of disintegrating physics and psychic shock.

Time lost all meaning. It stretched and snapped, hurling him backwards through the childhood of stars and forwards into the silent, heat-death of universes yet to be.

Consciousness was a flickering thing. He remembered the crushing pressure of the void between worlds, the chilling touch of absolute zero, the brief, terrifying warmth of a supernova as he was flung through its heart. He was not a god traveling. He was wreckage, adrift.

When the storm finally spat him out, it was into a silence so profound it felt like a physical blow.

He lay, panting, on a surface that was not stone, not metal, not energy. It was… potential. It hummed with a low, pervasive thrum that was the root of all vibration. The air was still, with an absence, like a held breath that had lasted for eons.

Something in him recognized this stillness, that corruption that had always been clawing at his consciousness like an ever-enlarging abscess had finally burst open.

Groaning, every joint and muscle screaming in protest, Vyraak pushed himself up. His claws found no purchase, yet he did not slip. He stood.

And he looked upon the Palace of Time.

To call it a “palace” was a pathetic, mortal simplification. It was a place that existed in more than three dimensions, a nexus of all moments. Its walls were woven from the shimmering threads of causality, its foundations were the bedrock of “before” and “after,” and its towers were the very pillars of eternity, stretching up into a sky.

It was both immense and intimate, overwhelming and familiar. It was the source of the river, and the river itself.

And it was familiar.

That corruption inside him, that drive that had driven him from the moment he fell into death and gave him new meaning… that drive had found its destination.

The Red Moonlight Blade began to vibrate, and he could feel a pull from it that dragged his body towards the gates of this palace.

In the distance, a massive being whose face was filled with tentacles passed over the palace, but Vyraak did not notice.

[Vyraak’s introduction can be found in Chapter 1,397, for readers who wish for a refresher on this Dragon God. I recommend rereading it. His introduction was almost 400 Chapters ago.]