The Primordial Record - Chapter 1731: The Seed

Chapter 1731: The Seed

“Eos, wretched child, you are nothing!” Primordial Soul screamed as her face transformed from a hauntingly beautiful visage to a ghoulish monster resembling a humanoid bat with fangs too long for her mouth.

Her eyes shone with yellow radiance that was filled with madness and fury.

“YOU ARE A FLICKER. I AM ETERNAL AND SHALL NOT REST UNTIL EVERYTHING YOU KNOW AND LOVE IS CRUSHED.”

Her furious roar slammed into Rowan, who braced himself against it, anchored by his hate.

“Eternity,” Rowan grunted, raising the hammer again, his soul body screaming with the shock of exerting so much power, “is a long time to be a tyrant. And even rock wears away under a constant drip. This second blow is for Maeve, remember her name.”

The second hammer blow fell, and then a third.

“This is for my mother!” Another blow fell.

“For my children! Hear their names, Zaphriel, Malchiel…” Rowan began calling the names of his Angels, and as he did, a hammer blow fell on the screaming and cursing Primordial.

With each strike, the unmaking accelerated. The magnificent terror of her was being dismantled, not into death, but into void. Her protests became fewer words and more the raw, dissonant notes of creation reversing itself. Her limbs dissolved into their constituent concepts, then into nothing at all. The cold fire in her eyes guttered and went out, not like a snuffed candle, but like a mathematical equation that had reached its final, zero-sum.

Rowan was relentless. His hate needed a place to vent, and the Primordial was durable enough to receive it.

This hatred for her was also as intense as the hatred for himself, because every part of him was aware that anytime he lifted this hammer to unmake the Primordial, he was also killing a part of his heart.

In her screams, he could hear the voices of his mother, and he knew that if he held back, everything would have been meaningless. So Rowan continued, even as his heart was being ripped apart.

More of her essence poured out from that hidden place under this layer, keeping her alive longer than possible, but Rowan did not stop, as long as there was any part of her left behind, he would continue breaking them down.

This was the wonder and the horror of the Altar of Unmaking. If he had killed Primordial Soul anywhere but here on this altar, and she had remnants of herself far away from this place, then those remnants would survive.

But on this altar, every part of the Primordial was forced to return; it would not matter how far they were. Once their souls were captured upon this altar, it would all be collected and unmade. Rowan knew that Primordial Soul would not have liked Rowan to have seen this place; no Primordial would ever sleep easily with this altar under his control, but as it is, the past could no longer be changed.

The entire layer of the soul was shaking itself into destruction as Rowan’s hammer blows continued with relentless precision.

Finally, only her essence remained—a fading, furious impression of herself upon the Altar; everything else had been taken away. Rowan stood over it, breath ragged, the hammer now heavy with a purpose fulfilled.

He looked down at the last shimmer of what was once a goddess, a monster, a Primordial. Once, she may have been greatest in all Reality, with powers that few could hardly imagine, but now, the last remnants of her lie on this altar, waiting to die.

There was no pity in his heart. Only a vast, echoing quiet.

He spoke his last words to her, not in a shout, but in a whisper that carried the weight of his long endurance.

“Be unmade.”

He brought the hammer down one final time.

There was no flash, no explosion. Only a sigh, as of a universe breathing out for the first time without a burden. And then, silence. True silence. The Altar’s vortex stilled, its purpose complete.

Where she had been, there was only the empty, neutral stone of the Altar. Rowan dropped the hammer. It clanged against the floor, a shockingly mundane sound in the wake of killing the eternal.

He did not feel like a slayer of Primordials. He did not feel victorious. He simply felt… quiet. The endless, screaming pressure in his soul was gone. He was alone in the primordial dark, but for the first time, the darkness was just dark. It was not Her.

He had not killed a Primordial. He had simply made room.

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The black cube, which was the fourth layer of the soul, was half destroyed, and Rowan did not complete its total destruction because that would alert all of Reality that a Primordial had fallen.

He began to walk towards where he had detected the greatest amount of Primordial Soul’s essence had been flowing from, shoulders hunched, Rowan’s body occasionally shuddered as more weight was added to it.

This weight was of every new soul being born inside of Reality.

He did not need to do this. Primordial Soul, in all the years she had left Oblivion, did not bother to hold the souls of all of those born inside of it. Death had been able to easily feast upon countless souls of this Reality because there was no one to shepherd them once they fell.

Every mortal and every god had a sinking emptiness at the bottom of their soul. They knew that when they perished, only a lucky few would find solace in the afterlife, if there was ever such a thing.

Their afterlife was supposed to be in the hands of Primordial Soul, and she had discarded that responsibility. Even though Rowan could not make any overt showcase that he was essentially the new Primordial Soul, at least, not yet, he could hold the weight of all the souls in Reality.

Even if he had the chance to announce to everyone that their souls were now safe, Rowan was much too tired at this moment to play the role of savior. His own soul had been rubbed raw, and all he wanted to do was to find a quiet corner and curl into a ball, but he could not; the battle had just begun.

As Rowan walked forward, his surroundings shifted, and he found himself before a relatively small glowing amber pool. Floating above it was a seed.