The Primordial Record - Chapter 1754: Assembly of Great Power (1)
Chapter 1754: Assembly of Great Power (1)
The air in the Great Abyss did not move so much as it pulsed, a slow, rhythmic exhalation of pure, undiluted potential that was the closest thing to breath in that place beyond places.
It was the heartbeat of the void, a sound felt in the marrow of beings rather than heard by any auditory organ. And today, that pulse was quickening, a drumbeat summoning all of creation to witness an event of cataclysmic finality: the battle of two beings whose powers were said to be equal to that of the Primordials.
For a while now, this pulse had been growing, but the strength of it had abruptly heightened on this day, screaming into the mind of all consciousness in Reality.
The arena where this battle was to take place did not appear to be built; it almost felt
As if it was grown.
Appearing like a negative space carved from the starless, eternal dark of the Abyss, a bowl of impossible scale whose edges bled into the non-space of the endless void.
Its floor was a mosaic of dead dimensions, continents of shattered worlds fused together, their geography a schizophrenic tapestry of frozen magma flows, crystalline forests, and plains of black glass that reflected nothing.
The builders of this place had long exceeded their capabilities, and in the end, their bodies became simply vessels, and it was the Primordials that built this place using them as puppets.
Most of the builders, the Infernal Architects, perished in this endeavor, and those that remained had gone mad, their bodies and souls taken past their limits, and every day, their entire being prayed for death, but due to the excessive primordial energies that had run through their bodies, they could not be killed.
It did not matter the number of times they were killed, as long as the ones killing them did not have the power to decipher primordial laws, the suffering Architects would return.
Their despairing screams were just a small portion of this arena’s Aura.
The walls soared upward, not of stone or metal, but of compressed time and forgotten histories, a shimmering, nebulous barrier that contained the concept of ’inside’ and ’outside’. To look upon it was to feel a profound existential vertigo, the understanding that this was not a location one traveled to, but a focal point upon which all of existence was now bending its attention.
And they came. Not in ships or through gates, not by flight or spell, though such methods were employed by the lesser powers from all over Reality, even from the lower realms. The truly mighty ones arrived, their presence altering the local physics of the Abyss merely by their acknowledgment of it. Old Ones… in their billions!
There had never been any gathering like this, in any Era, in any Reality, and for such to be happening here was beyond all expectations.
Staff, daughter of Telmus, stood on the peak of the Great Abyss and watched the procession of the universe.
First were the Titans. They did not breach the void so much as the void parted for them. Their forms were mountains given consciousness, galaxies distilled into bipedal shape.
Auran, the World-Forger, whose body was a constantly shifting range of living rock, volcanoes simmering on his shoulders, rivers of molten iron coursing through fissures in his chest. His footsteps, silent in the airless Abyss, nonetheless sent psychic shockwaves through the gathering crowd, a tremor of pure, geologic mass.
With him came his kin: Skaldi, whose beard was a blizzard of dying stars, and whose voice was the crackle of cosmic background radiation; and Vyra, whose form was a vortex of silvery gas and nascent solar systems, a nebula in the shape of a woman.
These were the first Titans, direct children of the Primordial Beast, and they had countless hidden titles that were not known to many in Reality, but they had escaped from the Great Desert and now they walked Reality once more.
They took their seats not upon the arena’s benches, but on thrones they manifested from the raw stuff of possibility, their sheer size making them visible from every point in the infinite amphitheater. They were silent, their thoughts gravity wells around which lesser minds could fracture.
Then came the leviathans of the deep ether, the extra-dimensional beasts whose very biology was a violation of natural law.
The Xth’lgr, a creature that was less a body and more a complex, four-dimensional idea of hunger, a tessellated nightmare of bladed appendages and lamprey mouths that existed in multiple places at once, its true form impossible to focus on without going mad. It coiled into a section of the arena, and the space around it warped, the very concept of ’distance’ becoming subjective and treacherous for any being foolish enough to sit near it.
Following was the Zyxian Phantasm, a being of pure light and information, a shimmering, ever-evolving Mandelbrot set that communicated by directly rewriting the quantum data of the surrounding void.
Where it passed, temporary, perfect ecosystems of logical beauty and mathematical elegance would bloom and die in nanoseconds, a side effect of its mere cognitive processes.
They were joined by the Silent Choir, a collective of entities from a universe where sound was the only form of matter. They appeared as a complex, vibrating wave of harmonies and dissonances, a song that sculpted the darkness into fragile, beautiful sculptures that collapsed as soon as the note changed. Their ’seating’ was a designated frequency band in the arena’s acoustic spectrum, a melody reserved for their use.
The gathering was a flood now, a torrent of infinite variety. From the molten core of a billion worlds came the Igneous Sentients, beings of living magma and conscious crystal, hissing and popping as the absolute cold of the Abyss fought a perpetual war against their innate heat, creating coronas of steam that froze instantly into diamond-dust halos.
From the quantum foam of creation’s dawn came the Q’tari, flickering in and out of existence, their forms a probability function, never entirely certain until observed. They occupied seats that were both there and not there, their collective observation of each other the only thing keeping any of them semi-stable.
The lords of the infernal and the divine arrived in their legions. Archdevils in baroque, obsidian armor, their wings shedding embers of damned souls, their rhetoric sharp and full of cunning offers and contractual loopholes even as they sought their places.
They were mirrored by Celestial Creators, beings of incandescent light and geometric perfection, their auras casting pure, unwavering truths that burned the lies off nearby demons, causing much hissing and defensive shadow-making. A temporary, tense demilitarized zone solidified between these ancient enemy factions, an aisle of neutral vacuum humming with suppressed violence.
The mortal-adjacent races, those who had clawed their way to power through magic or technology, arrived with more visible effort. Dyson Sphere-sized arks of the Mechanus Synod, a race of uploaded intelligences housed in planet-sized servers, translated into reality with a scream of bending physics, deploying intricate energy scaffolds that served as their viewing platform. Their conversations were laser-tight data bursts, a silent, frantic exchange of calculations and predictions about the coming conflict.
Elven fleets of living wood, grown from world-trees, sailed the psychic currents, their graceful, organic forms a stark contrast to the brutalist geometry of the Mechanus. Their ancient, weary eyes, having seen the rise and fall of galaxies, scanned the gathering with a melancholic awe. Next to them, the Dwarven Hold-Thrones, entire hollowed-out asteroids propelled by runic engines, bristling with cannons that could snuff out stars, a testament to paranoia forged into engineering.
There were races of pure thought, energy, and shadow. Beings of liquid mirror that reflected not the observer, but the observer’s most profound regrets. Swarms of insectoid creatures from a hive-mind dimension, each individual a single neuron in a vast, distributed brain that calculated the statistical probability of every possible outcome of the duel. Giants of living void, patches of deeper darkness that drank the light and sound around them.
The air, though technically absent, was thick with the mediums of communication: psychic broadcasts, gravitational pulses, chemical pheromone clouds, encoded light waves, and sheer conceptual projection. The cacophony was not noise, but a layered, incomprehensible symphony of existence itself.
A hush, or its multidimensional equivalent—a sudden averaging-out of the frantic energy, a dip in the psychic waveform—fell across a section of the arena. The Titans themselves turned their cosmic heads. Through a rift that opened not in space, but in understanding, came a Primordial Beast.
