The Primordial Record - Chapter 1849: Final Form (3)
Chapter 1849: Final Form (3)
“Are they entirely mindless?” Rowan asked in puzzlement. The eyes staring down on him were filled with power, but lacked a certain direction. It was as if a single body was crammed full with a billion different minds, all striving for control, and in the resultant chaos, there could be no lead, only endless clash that led to a devolution.
“No, they are not mindless,” Eosah replied to him, “Their immortal nature means that if every Origin they devour, they gain another mind that is a direct copy of the original. It means that in each Primordial, there are a multitude of Primordials vying for control, all mad and filled with hunger, and they all have equal minds and capabilities, so there can be no winner, just an endless battle. But don’t you dare think of pitying them; they have discovered ways of going around this limitation, and you have experienced those methods firsthand.”
Rowan cocked his head to the side, as he stated flatly in realization, “The Primordials inside of Reality.”
“Yes. I don’t know how the minds that are going to be picked are decided upon, but there would be one unlucky Reality among many that would suffer the fate of being infected with some of the minds of the Primordials, and using this method, the Primordials are able to think, plot and plan their way into the future, free of the hunger and madness being experienecd by their main bodies inside Limbo. However, I believe that my situation is highly peculiar, and perhaps the reason I was born outside the boundaries of the Cradle of Enoch was due to the interventions of the Primordials.”
Rowan was now deeply interested in her words, “Why do you say that?”
“All Realities have inherited memories, and for a plague like the Primordials, the knowledge of their activities is nearly at the top of that list.” Eosah shook her head, either in the grip of memory or to comfort herself, “In my memories, there had been many Realities infected by the minds of the Primordials in the past, but the time period the minds stay inside these Realities is extremely short. The shortest had been a few million years, and the longest not nearing five billion years. As you know, the Primordials have been inside my corpse for nine Major Eras, and I know they have been able to get away with this travesty for so long because I was born outside the Cradle of Enoch, and I do not enjoy the guidance of the Beast of Inevitability.”
She brought up her fingers and began to point out, “In the time inside me, they have performed various duties that went outside their nature. They allowed life to flourish, gave the mortals the ability to cultivate, even mimicked the Era Cycles of Reality as close as possible, all of it was to give my dead corpse a semblance of life, all of it was just to create a sandbox… for you, Rowan.”
Rowan’s eyes flashed. Life had a way of coming full circle. The answers to the deepest questions he had were always with him from the beginning, but it took standing on a greater height to see the whole picture.
When he awoke as a child on Trion, confused and scared by his transmigration and not understanding a single thing about his situation, he did not know he had been placed inside The Nexus. A place where everything was carefully crafted so that he could be observed by a higher power.
His friends, his land, his mother, his people… all were made to be props, and breaking that awful game had been his first step in walking out of that nightmare. However the saying that had haunted all of Rowan’s waking hours still remained applicable to this day; the more things change, the more they remained the same.
Eosah was right; all of the games, lies, and deceit were all done by powers that Rowan could previously not even imagine, but he had always felt that invisible chain around his neck from the moment he opened his eyes into this Reality. He had hated the ones who were responsible for placing these chains around him.
All of his life had been a quest to hunt down and eradicate the hands behind the curtain, and now that he was close to the end of his quest, he did not know what to feel. The Primordials were always the bad guys in his book; they had committed atrocities of such magnitude that even if the evidences were presented to mortals and immortals, their minds would literally not be able to understand it.
It was like a mortal being told the number of atoms inside a universe; they might hear the ridiculous number and be amazed, but they could not fully interpret what that number really meant, and even Rowan was struggling to understand the sheer scale of butchery needed to poison an actual infinite space to transform it into Limbo.
But now that he was standing before their endless perverted majesty, Rowan did not know what to feel about their present situation. It was true that these beings had caused such great suffering across all of existence that could hardly be imagined, but it was also true that the suffering they were enduring must be so great that even death would be a mercy.
Rowan had been deliberately holding back his consciousness from reaching across to the Primordials because he could sense the power, pain, and madness that filled these eyes without even touching them, and he did not know if hr could handle what it would take to even touch a small part of their consciousness.
The allure was there, of course, like a firefly staring into a sun that was placed in front of it. What would it be like if he could just reach across the distance to… touch. What experience and sensation could he feel? Would his mind be able to process the madness and hunger of this magnitude?
“Do not do it, Rowan,” the voice of warning from Eosah shook him from the reverie imposed by the presence of the Primordials, “You would permanently lose a part of yourself. I have not completed the memory impactation about what we know of Primordials.”
Eosah’s tone turned grave, “The Primordials in this form may be largely mindless, but their act of placing minds inside of Reality gives them certain benefits. One of those benefits is that once the merger with these minds takes place after they are retrieved, for a short time, the longest being a few million years, the Primordials would gain a measure of sanity and awareness.” Eosah shivered, “These are the times they turn cruel, Rowan, these are the times they hunt and burn and desecrate, and they do not feed, they just destroy.”
She paused before she continued, “There is a direct correlation between the time they spend inside Reality and how long they can regain their sanity outside of it. I fear that the Primordials have stayed too long inside my Reality, and when they are merged with their minds, the disaster that such a thing would bring would be unimaginable, because they might finally have the time and the resources to finally destroy the Cradle of Enoch.”
