The Primordial Record - Chapter 2174 You Have A Choice
Chapter 2174 You Have A Choice
The Soul Origins that were still clustered around her core were screaming in what could be pain or pleasure as they were being ripped from her, as the lightning blasting out from her core was tearing them away, causing them to spill into the void like blood from a wound.
The countless stolen souls that had made her, the countless deaths, the endless betrayals, the eternal hunger, were being stripped from her, layer by layer, truth by truth.
Eos had not forgotten that at the core of each Ancient Primordial was something that was not necessarily evil, but they had been given this path of endless hunger, and their fate was sealed.
As Eos drew out the Soul Origin from the unknown light inside her, tearing that fusion apart, the Soul Origin began to scream.
Looking closer, Eos noticed countless tendrils from the pale light that had sunk into the Origin of Soul like foot-length maggots infesting a wound, and as he pulled, those tendrils were dragged out of the Origin.
“NO!” Nyxara’s scream was the sound of a Reality being unmade. “You cannot take this from me! This is what I AM! This is what I have always BEEN! Without the hunger, without the need, without the—”
She suddenly stopped as the last layer of her being had been stripped away, and beneath it, there was something that Eos had not expected.
There was a child.
A girl, no older than a mortal child, with hair the color of starlight and eyes that held the memory of a thousand gardens blooming in the dark.
She was curled in on herself, trembling, her hands pressed over her ears as if trying to block out a sound that had been screaming in her head since the beginning of time.
“I didn’t want to,” she whispered. “I never wanted to. They made me. They made me.”
Eos’s grip loosened, a bit in shock because he had not expected that the child that had existed sixty-five million years ago was still wrapped in the core of Soul’s Origin after all this time.
The thousand eyes in his crown focused on the child, and in each one, he saw the same thing… a being who had been shaped by forces she could not control, who had become something she never chose to be, and who had suffered for longer than anyone in Existence could imagine.
“Who are you?” Eos asked, with suspicion in his eyes, as the child looked up at him, and in her eyes, he saw something that made even his transformed heart ache… and inside his heart, Eos felt fear.
There was no reason why he should be feeling such emotions like this from just looking at a child, almost as if he was being forced to feel all of this.
Eos had been forced to think and feel many things in his life, and he had become capable of separating emotions and thoughts that were not his own.
At his present level, he considered it impossible for anyone to influence his thoughts, but now what he was feeling for this girl was so natural, it was almost as if he was the one feeling this way, but Eos knew himself, and he could not just fall for the pain of someone who was his enemy so easily.
There was no suspicion in his heart, and even now, this thought of his that was detecting that something was wrong was quietly fading away in the background.
Eos squeezed his hand tighter and held on to that part of him that was skeptical, and then he decided to play this game and know where all of it led. The girl had not answered his first question, and he asked her, “Who made you?”
“Him,” she said after a moment. “The one who returned… Can you not hear his voice like madness in your ears? The one who made us all, and pushed me to become this person. He needed us to be hungry, so very hungry, I have forgotten what it means to ever be satisfied. He needed us to consume; every single moment of our lives is one where we MUST feed. He needed us to be the end.”
She reached out, and her small, fragile hand touched Eos’s arm. Eos idly noted that where she had touched the light of his new form began to fade, talking back his human form.
However, a large part of his mind was not aware of this transformation; it was almost as if it were natural. After all, the battle had been won, and if he kept his form, he might drive this innocent girl to madness, and he needed to be a little more kind.
The fear inside of Eos was growing, but he stopped it from emerging and allowed his body to take back his human shape and all of its weaknesses.
“Please,” she whispered. “Make it stop. Make the hunger stop. I don’t want to be hungry anymore… I never wanted to be hungry. I just wanted to grow, but he would not allow me. I have been hungry for so long that I do not know what to do. Please free me from this eternal torment.”
Eos could feel a surge of pain at the thought of the suffering that this child had endured.
How much more could that bastard Enoch take from Existence before he was satisfied? He saw innocence and corrupted it, and now, it was up to him to clean up the mess that that monster had left behind, and he would not fail her.
He had all the powers of Origin; he may not have understood his full might, but he was slowly getting to the point where nothing would be able to stand against him, and it was the right time for him to correct one of the greatest sins of the past and give this child peace once again.
Eos was silent for a long moment, then he reached into his chest, pushing past the barrier of his skin into the Maw That Crafts, and from it, he drew out a seed.
This act of drawing out this seed seemed to have cost him, as he went a bit pale, but this seed was a bit special, as it contained his endless potential.
It was from this seed that he created the Archai, and he slowly placed the seed in the hands of the child whose eyes were filled with hope.
The girl gasped as where it touched her, the hunger that had defined her existence began to fade away like a nightmare that could not survive the light of morning.
“What is it?” the child asked, wonder in her voice.
“It’s a choice,” Eos said, and he smiled.
