The Primordial Record - Chapter 2206 The Smile of A Predator (2)

Chapter 2206  The Smile of A Predator (2)

However, this thought felt a bit like sacrilege in her mind. How could she doubt her lord? It must be this place. End had stripped too much from her, and until they left this place, she could not trust her judgment.

“I’m sorry,” Circe said to Rowan, and her voice was very small. “I have been dreaming of you.”

“I know,” Rowan said.

“You do?”

“In the distant past, I believed I had been sending the dreams. Still, that was so long ago, I thought I had dreamt it. Thank you for confirming that it was not just a dream.”

Circe went very still. “It is the least I could do. I brought the dreams to Eos, and many changes happened in Existence due to it. With this dream, I think the future became shaped by it, although I don’t know how Eos had used it.”

Rowan tilted his head in his small, considering way.

“He used it the way it should. I know myself, and among all things, we are ruthless to our enemies, but that is nothing to our ruthlessness to our own selves,” he said.

The words hung in the air of End like a note held too long.

Prime’s arms tightened fractionally around the child without his conscious decision. He felt, not for the first time in this valley, the low, cold pressure of something being slightly wrong that he did not yet have the framework to name.

The child had been alone for eternities and had kept himself alive by singing a single held note across geological time. There was no reason, no reason whatsoever, to feel what Prime was beginning to feel.

And yet.

“Let’s go home,” Prime said, and his voice came out more carefully than he had intended. “There is someone waiting for you.”

“Yes,” Rowan said. “I can feel him.”

“Are you ready?”

“I have been ready for a long time.”

Prime adjusted the small body in his arms and turned back the way they had come.

Victorious Genesis, who had said almost nothing the entire journey, who had been enjoying the subtraction of his complications down to the simple fact of a man in this place, fell into step beside Prime.

His face was unreadable. His eyes, when Prime glanced at them, were on the child.

“Prime,” Victorious Genesis said, sending his thoughts into his mind so that Rowan could not hear. “His shadow.”

Prime did not immediately look. He kept walking, and he replied to Victorious Genesis also with his mind, “What about it?”

“Look at it. Don’t let him see you looking.”

Prime waited a long, slow breath. Then, as if shifting Rowan’s weight in his arms, he let his eyes drop to the substrate beneath his feet, and he looked at the place where the child’s shadow should have been.

The shadow was there, and it was the correct size and shape, and it moved with the correct timing of a shadow of a child being carried.

But the edges of it were… wrong.

Not in a way that Prime could have pointed to, if he had been asked to describe it. The edges were edges. They were not frayed or bleeding or doing any of the visually legible things that wrong shadows did in stories.

They were simply… the only word Prime had for it was listening.

The edges of the shadow were listening, the way the edges of a predator were listening while the rest of its body held still.

Prime looked away before Rowan could notice him looking.

“Keep walking,” Victorious Genesis murmured inside his head.

“I am.”

“Don’t tell Vraegar yet.”

“He already knows.”

Victorious Genesis made a small sound that might have been a laugh, if Victorious Genesis had been the kind of Primordial who laughed in a time like this… which he was. “Of course he does.”

They kept walking, and behind them, End seemed to breathe out, a long, slow exhalation, the kind of breath a room makes when something that has been sitting in it for a very long time finally leaves.

The substrate shifted slightly under their feet, as the compressed histories sighed in their strata. The silent frequency of erosion that had been the fabric of the place since before any of them arrived wavered, for just a moment, as if End itself were uncertain what to do now that its longest resident was being carried out.

Prime tightened his grip on the child, and the child leaned his small white head against Prime’s shoulder, and exhaled, and said something that Prime almost did not hear.

“I have been waiting so long to see him.”

“He’ll be glad to see you,” Prime said, because it was the thing that was expected to be said.

22:18

“Yes,” Rowan agreed. “He will.”

And again there was that small wrongness in the phrasing, not I hope so, not do you think so?, but the flat evaluative yes, he will, the small confident statement of a being who had already calculated the response and found it acceptable.

Prime did not say anything else as he continued to carry the child toward the door that Prime’s own power had melted open, and behind them the song did not resume, because the singer was no longer in his hollow, and the saddest thing Prime had ever heard was therefore silent for the first time in many eternities, and in the silence, something in the substrate of End, something that had been sleeping under the song the way a reef sleeps under a tide, began, very quietly, to turn over.

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At the threshold, before they crossed back out, Rowan lifted his head from Prime’s shoulder and looked at Vraegar.

“You came for me,” he said.

“Yes,” Vraegar said.

“You came alone, for a long time.”

“Yes.”

“You would have died here.”

“Yes.”

Rowan considered the dragon for a long, slow moment. His small face, which had been so gentle throughout the journey, was for that one moment not gentle; it became careful, the careful, expressionless evaluation of something that was weighing a piece on a board.

Then the small gentleness returned, and Rowan said, “Thank you.”

“You are welcome,” Vraegar said, and the dragon’s voice was very quiet.

They crossed back through the window, and on the other side, as Aeternitas returned to her full brightness in Prime’s bones and Fury’s phoenix-light resumed its high thrum and Circe’s immortality uncoiled and Victorious Genesis re-acquired his glow as a Titan, the small child in Prime’s arms did not brighten.

He stayed small, and his shadow, in the light of reality outside End, suddenly became nonexistent.

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