The Primordial Record - Chapter 2204 The Song of Rowan (2)
Chapter 2204 The Song of Rowan (2)
The song held them spellbound for what could be considered years, as they could not move for the fear that a single sound they made would taint the sound of it.
After a while, Prime sighed, his voice breaking the spell the song had over them. They could not just stand here forever when they had an important task before them, even though Prime would like nothing more than to stand here forever and listen to the voice of the Incarnation of his father.
Prime frowned when he sensed something, and he touched the air in front of him. A dawning look of horror began to cover his eyes. ‘What is wrong with the time stream here?’
Looking back now, Prime realized that he had been too careless with his understanding of End, and its effects on concepts even as ephemeral as time.
“He has been singing for many eternities,” Prime gasped in horror.
Circe and the rest turned to him, and Prime showed them that time in this place flowed much faster than in Existence, and a single second in Existence was equal to one cosmic era!
Enoch was the tether to this place, holding the past, the present, and the future firmly to this space, and when he left, this space became untethered, and it had drifted for eternities beyond counting.
To think about how much time must have passed was a deeply frightening thought.
“How can anyone survive in a place like this for that long?” Victorious Genesis gaped.
“I think it’s because of his music,” Circe whispered.
Prime paused, and he nodded, “He sings because he cannot remember how to do anything else. He sings because if he stopped, he would forget he was still here.”
“Damn, and I thought I could not respect him more,” Victorious Genesis sighed, and then he asked, “What was he like?” In a hushed voice. “You know… before. I did not know him before he created our race.”
It was surprising that it was the dragon that answered this question, but it was not too strange if you think about it. After all, he was considered to be the first child of Eos, and at the time Vraegar was born, Eos was still Rowan Kuranes, and he held one of the primitive bloodlines of the Grand Creator.
The dragon came from Rowan’s shattered body, and he had known his father for a long time, which meant that his connection to this Incarnation was also deep.
Vraegar was quiet for a long moment.
“He was hope,” he said finally, and he smiled, a rather frightening look for a dragon. “Not a hopeful person, not a person who carried hope. I meant true Hope, like the concept, before we knew that it could be given form. This Incarnation was what Eos cut off from himself when he could not afford to carry hope any longer. Eos sent his hope into the dark to survive, because Eos himself could not survive with it. He had to be ruthless. Hope would not have let him be ruthless. So he sent him away, and he went where he sent him, and he did what Eos asked, even if Eos did not fully understand what he was asking for, and here he found answers.”
The dragon’s voice had gone very quiet. “And Enoch found him, and held him. End had been slowly wearing him down all these eternities, and still, this is what we’re here to find… the ruined shape of the hope that Eos sent out to become the being who could save us all… if he fails to stop the enemy.”
No one spoke after that, and they could only listen to the song of Rowan, and each of them could hear something different.
®
They pushed through the song, and they found him in a valley that had once been a heart, but maybe the others saw something different; it was impossible to tell and useless to ask.
Prime saw the topography of the landscape suddenly resolve itself, and he realized with a slow, dawning horror that they had been walking across a body.
The compressed civilizations were capillaries. The folded histories were muscle. The entire realm of End was shaped, at this scale, like a vast collapsed circulatory system, and the valley they were entering was where the heart had been before End had stilled it.
And in the lowest point of the valley, sitting in the hollow where the heart had beaten, was the last Incarnation of Eos.
He was small.
That was the first thing Prime noticed, and the most devastating. The Incarnations and everything associated with Eos tended toward grandeur.
Vraegar, Prime himself, all the other Incarnations who all reached the fifth level of their Origin and whose might and power could never be equaled… and the last Incarnation was none of these things.
He was now the size of a mortal child, thin, and his skin had the quality of something that had been bleached by long exposure to a light that was not really light.
His hair was white, the white of something that had been in the dark so long it had forgotten what color it was supposed to be, and he was singing.
His eyes were closed, with his hands folded on his lap. He was sitting cross-legged in the hollow, and the song that had been audible since they entered End was coming from him.
The song was a single held note, shaped and reshaped by the smallest movements of his throat, carrying the weight of countless eternities of continuous utterance.
When they approached, he did not open his eyes. But the song changed.
It brightened.
“He knows you’re here,” Vraegar said softly. “He has always been able to feel other pieces of Eos. Even like this. Even diminished.”
Prime knelt before the child.
He did not know why he knelt. It was not a gesture he had planned. His body had simply chosen to kneel, the way bodies sometimes knew things that minds had not yet learned. He knelt, and he reached out, and he placed his hand over the small folded hands in the child’s lap.
The singing stopped, and the silence was long.
Then the child opened his eyes.
They were Rowan’s eyes or Eos’s, but the eyes of the dying prince in the room full of bodies, the eyes of the mortal miner waking up in the wrong life, the eyes of the scared and furious and refusing-to-quit young man who had started this entire journey by choosing, against all sense, to try to live.
They were the eyes of who Eos had been before he had to become what he was now.
The child looked at Prime, and then, for the first time in sixty-five million years, he spoke.
“You’re late,” he said.
His voice was hoarse from long disuse and from a song that had no rest in it, and there was no accusation in the words. Only a small tired observation, the kind a child made when they had been waiting a long time and had stopped expecting anyone to come.
Prime’s throat closed. He could not speak for a moment.
“I’m sorry,” he said finally. “I’m sorry. We came as soon as we could.”
The child tilted his head, the small motion of someone considering an answer.
“He didn’t know I was still here,” he said. It was not a question.
