The Primordial Record - Chapter 1748: What Is Destiny?

Chapter 1748: What Is Destiny?

‘My mother… Minerva that bitch, she was my…. &@%^ She loved me dearly…. Hate! Hate! &!~%^¥ Love… I love my mother!’

Telmus frowned, disturbed by the demon’s words and the inquiry about his lovely mother. It was a precious memory, pure and warm, a defense against the dark.

But the memories of that event came to him in a flood, almost as if it was being pushed into his mind,

“It was my fifth summer. The wood was smooth, worn from my own hands carving it. She had placed it in my hands and said, ‘This is not for hurting. This is for protecting.’ It was the moment I understood purpose.”

‘This is wrong, that cruel goddess wanted me to kill!’

Xylos, the Primordial Demon, was silent for a long moment, and the silence was more unnerving than its previous speech. “A beautiful story,” it finally said. “Now, shall I tell you what actually happened that day?”

‘Ah, so he knows that something is wrong.’

“I was there. I remember.” Telmus growled, a part of him wondering why he was defending a memory that seemed fake.

The demon laughed, “You remember the story you have told yourself ten thousand times. You remember the meaning you assigned to the event decades later. I, however, was already nestled deep within your bloodline, a faint whisper in the back of every mind that bore your name. I was there. I felt the day through your infantile senses. Your mother was distracted by the weight of the world. The sun was hot from the touch of Golgoth’s anger, and it was giving her a headache. She was anxious; there had been talk of Breakers who hunted divine spawns on the road. She had snatched up a piece of scrap wood to keep you quiet because you had been whining for attention. She had shoved it into your hands and grumbled, ‘Don’t hurt yourself with that.’

Telmus had been fixated on the words of the demon, and when he halted, he nearly shook; it was as if he was pulled under a spell, as he could see the scene being described in his mind.

The demon grinned and continued his story,

“There was no noble lesson. There was no profound wisdom. There was a tired, irritable woman trying to quiet a bothersome child. The rest… the meaning, the purpose… You built that yourself, afterwards, to create a noble origin for a life that, like all lives, began in randomness and need.”

As if he was enjoying what he was about to say next, Primordial Demon spoke softly and slowly, “You became a great warrior just because your mother wanted to keep you quiet.”

The words were like a physical blow. Telmus felt the memory shimmer, its edges suddenly uncertain. The warm sun felt, in retrospect, oppressive. The proud look on his mother’s face seemed, for the first time, like a squint against the light.

“You’re lying,” Telmus said, but the conviction was weak.

“Why would I lie?” Xylos asked, his tone one of genuine curiosity. “The truth is so much more devastating. A lie would grant you comfort, and I have no interest in your comfort. I am the dismantler of comfort. I am the thing that scrapes away the pretty paint to show the rotten wood beneath. Your entire life, Telmus, is a gallery of such paintings. The love of your mother? Her own fear of being alone. The loyalty of your comrades? Their shared terror of dying without someone watching their back. Every single virtue you hold dear is a defense mechanism against the terrifying void of a universe that does not care if you live or die.”

“That doesn’t make it less real!” Telmus argued, a desperate heat rising in him. “So what if we build our meaning? So what if we tell ourselves stories to get through the night? That doesn’t make the meaning any less potent! The love I felt was real. The honor was real to me!”

“Was it?” Xylos pressed, its voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper. “The night you were granted the title of Ancestor of the Minerva bloodline, you stood vigil in the chapel. You swore an oath on your soul to protect the weak and serve your people. Do you remember the feeling? The sublime certainty?”

Telmus whispered, “Yes.”

“And what were you really thinking about as you knelt there in the silence? Were you contemplating the divine weight of duty? Or were you thinking about the captain’s daughter, and the way her dress had clung to her hips at the feast earlier that evening? Were you measuring the length of the sword they’d given you, comparing it to the one your rival carried? Were you planning how you might one day use your new station to increase your family’s land holdings?”

Telmus’s silence was answer enough. The memory, once a pillar of his identity, now felt shaky, compromised by the mundane, selfish, human thoughts that had indeed flickered through his mind that night.

Xylos wasn’t creating falsehoods; it was merely highlighting the parts he had chosen to edit out of his own story, and the part of him that was sensing that his memory was suspect was slowly fading under the weight of guilt.

“You see?” Xylos murmured. “You edit your own past to create a continuous, purposeful narrative. You call this narrative your ‘life’. I call it fiction. Your Destiny is not a path laid out for you. It is the story you insist on telling in hindsight, connecting random events with a line of intention that was never truly there.”

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Days turned into weeks within the mind-space. Or perhaps it was centuries. Time had no meaning here, only the rhythm of their discourse. Xylos was an endless, patient excavator, and Telmus’s life was the archaeological site. The demon would pick a cherished memory, a foundational belief, and with the precision of a surgeon, he would dissect it, revealing the tendons of fear, the bones of chance, and the marrow of self-deception that lay beneath.

They spoke of battle, and Xylos dissected the concept of glory, reducing it to chemical reactions of adrenaline and the base thrill of dominance. They talked of love, and Xylos unraveled it as a complex negotiation of need, evolutionary impulse, and the terror of solitude. They spoke of gods, and Xylos, who was ancient enough to have felt the first thoughts of worship coalesce in the first sentient minds, laughed. “They are stories you tell to explain the storm and the sickness. You created them because the alternative—that the storm and the sickness have no reason, no author, and no purpose—was too terrible to bear. You would rather have a cruel god than no god at all, for cruelty can be appeased. Randomness cannot.”

Telmus fought back, not with anger now, but with a weary, stubborn insistence. He couldn’t deny the truths Xylos presented, but he began to challenge their primacy.

“So my mother was weary,” Telmis said one time. “So what? The meaning I took from that moment is no less real for its origin. I chose to hear ‘protect’ even if she said ‘don’t hurt yourself.’ I made that choice. That is the power you refuse to acknowledge. The power to assign meaning.”

“A power born of desperation,” Xylos countered.

“But power nonetheless!” Telmus’s voice gained a sliver of its old strength. “You show me the scaffolding and claim the building is therefore an illusion. But the building stands! It shelters people! It provides a view from its heights! The love I felt may have been rooted in my own needs, but it also prompted me to act with kindness. The honor may have been a story, but it compelled me to stand when others fled. You keep pointing to the ingredients and claiming the meal isn’t real. But I have tasted it. I have lived it. Its reality is in its consequence, not its recipe.”

Xylos seemed to ripple, a sign of interest. “You are beginning to argue on my terms. You are admitting the constructed nature of your reality.”

“I am admitting that reality might be a collaboration,” Telmus said. “Between the random chaos of the world and the ordering principle of a conscious mind. You are pure chaos. I am the order. That is why you need my consent. Because of my ordering principle, my ability to say ‘this matters’ is the one thing you cannot simulate. You can break everything else down to base components, but you cannot create the spark of genuine belief. You can only extinguish it… or covet it.”

The demon fell silent. The dying stars of its eyes watched him, and for the first time, Telmus thought he sensed not just hunger, but a deep, ancient, and profound… loneliness.

“You are the first to frame it that way; it is no wonder that Rowan finds you special,” Xylos said, and its voice had lost all its theatrical grandeur. It was just a voice, old and tired. “Most break. They see the machinery, and their spirit shatters. They give me their consent as a form of surrender, a final acknowledgment that nothing matters. But you… You see the machinery and you insist on the beauty of the clock’s face anyway.”

“What is Destiny, Xylos?” Telmus asked, seizing the moment. “If it is not a pre-written path, and it is not meaningless chaos… what is it?”