The Primordial Record

Chapter 1714: Killing The Thirst

The clash between Rowan and Primordial Soul was taking place in a higher-dimensional realm with properties of the ninth dimension, yet the Origin Land was beginning to suffer nearly irreparable damage.

The void had transformed from an inert space to something eerily consumable. It tasted of rust, ozone, and the metallic tang of freshly spilled divinity, the likes of which had long been lost from Reality.

The land around them for countless light years wasn’t earth; it was the scab of a reality torn from normality into madness, a crust of ossified screams and crystallized despair over a churning abyss of primordial chaos.

Above, a bruised sky pulsed with veins of sickly green and bruised purple, where distant, lidless eyes blinked with the slow, indifferent rhythm of dying suns.

This was the result of higher-level laws of Will being created and destroyed in great magnitudes; this was the wound between Realities and was the fallback option for a higher-dimensional realm to contain the spillage of such a clash.

Rowan had lost thirty percent of his soul, and even with his great tenacity, his Aura had begun to diminish, but his battle capabilities had risen. Being pushed towards the edge of nothingness, he was not weakened; instead, he grew stronger. The same thing seemed to be happening to Primordial Soul, yet hers was different.

Every time Rowan destroyed her body and she sacrificed her Origin to return to life, it was as if he was peeling back layers of flesh like an onion to reveal her core. It was as if everything he had been killing was the masks she wore to deceive all of Reality, and Rowan had succeeded in breaking through the many masks to the real Primordial within.

This was the first time he was seeing a Primordial, and if not for the strength of his consciousness, Rowan would have fled.

It was easy to forget that Primordials were not limited to their Origin. The Primordial Soul was just a mask borne by the Primordial, who stole the origin of souls from this Reality. Only after shedding this guise would their true nature be revealed.

The First Thirst, known as Primordial of Soul, stood not just as a woman, but as an absence given dreadful form.

Her silhouette was woven from the negative space left by extinguished consciousnesses, a painting of stolen sighs and silenced prayers.

Within her, Realities filled with endless lost souls flickered and screamed, trapped fireflies in a jar of obsidian glass. Her face was a shifting mosaic – a child’s terrified sob one moment, a lover’s final gasp the next, an ancient sage’s bewildered stare the next, all dissolving into the hungry void beneath.

She radiated a crushing melancholy, the weight of every unfulfilled longing, every forgotten dream. This Primordial wasn’t just essence; it was memory, and the First Thirst was the archive of all that ever wept.

All whose cravings could never be satisfied, the betrayer and the betrayed, everything that was wrong, given a voice.

This thing spoke,

“You must always have known that meeting here, this battle, was entropy’s inevitable tide. Seeing me as I am, you have seen the end of your path.”

Rowan shook his head in irritation, “And is that the path of soul?”

“What else is there?” the First Thirst crooned, ” Endless possibilities bloom at our command, and I shall save all of existence when I become complete; all other paths lead to him.”

Rowan’s eyes lit up as he asked, with great weight in his voice, “Who is he?” He feared and expected the answer.

“Your wretched father… Enoch. Now, I end another of his children!”

She attacked, and Rowan did not hold back, knowing that the end was coming and refusing to allow any shred of weakness to taint his Will, despite everything he had learnt and the magnitude of the enemy before him.

Rowan’s eyes flashed as he sacrificed half his soul and pushed it into the body of the Revenant Incarnation, activating Realm’s Butcher Onslaught to the extreme.

Space folded, screamed, and tore like wet parchment as the First Thirst converged towards Rowan, a sigh given terrible purpose; her form elongated, becoming a spear of concentrated sorrow aimed at his form, but the Revenant Incarnation stepped forward to welcome the attack.

The Incarnation did not try to stop the attack; instead, he opened himself and accepted the blow, his chest parting like rotten fruit before her ethereal touch. He might be Rowan’s Incarnation, but he lacked his durability. Still, that did not matter for what he wanted to achieve.

Like a whale swallowing water, the body of the Incarnation absorbed the entirety of the Primordial.

Inside the Incarnation, the First Thirst didn’t find organs. She found war. She saw the echoing screams of the first cellular conflict, the shattering of primal atoms, the grinding tectonic fury of nascent worlds. Her touch, designed to unravel essence, met a maelstrom of pure, self-sustaining destruction. This was the Core of Rowan’s Slaughter Revenant Aspect and his Realm’s Butcher Onslaught.

Anti-Life, Anti-Creation itself.

The First Thirst screamed within the Incarnation as her body brushed against this anti-creation – not dying, but unbecoming, their histories erased, their identities dissolved into the raw, shrieking static of conflict.

The Incarnation screamed, and Rowan also roared in pain, a sound that cracked the scab-crust beneath them, revealing the churning, multi-colored chaos below.

Struggling to escape the death zone that the body of the Incarnation had become, the First Thirst pushed one of her arms out of the Incarnation’s chest, clawing for salvation. Her screams were madness.

Pushing through the pain and the madness of placing his mind into such a convergence of forces, his Will steadied the mind of his Incarnation, knowing he could not let the Primordial escape. With all of the sacrifices he had made and all the grief he had suffered, being this close to winning the fight, he could not let her win.

Feeling the depth of his conviction, his Incarnation responded.

The hand of the Incarnation, large enough to cradle a mountain range, closed around the ephemeral shaft of the Primordial’s limb. Where his fingers touched, her form crystallized– not into ice, but into jagged shards of solidified grief, snapping off with the sound of a million breaking hearts.

The Primordial recoiled, not in pain, but in profound violation. The crystallized grief embedded in the Incarnation’s palm pulsed with captured anguish before dissolving, absorbed into his furious heart.

Turning to Rowan, the Incarnation grinned, a rictus that split his face to the hinge of his jaw, revealing teeth like broken monoliths dripping with saliva that sizzled where it hit the ground. He flexed the hand, and new scars, shaped like weeping faces, formed over the knuckles.

“We shall kill them all,” the Incarnation said, and then he began to implode, compressing all the powers of the end into the Primordial trapped inside of him.

“No, this cannot be; I am eternal.”

The Primordial became desperate; she inverted. Her outer form collapsed inward like a dying star, revealing not emptiness but a nexus—a place where all the souls within her were stripped bare, not as individuals but as raw feelings—terror, joy, love, despair—woven into a pulsating, cancerous heart of pure emotional potential.

This was the Core of Soul, the beating engine of all sentient experience. She thrust this exposed core against the Will of the Incarnation, a psychic tsunami of pure being intended to overwhelm, to drown his oblivion in the sheer, crushing weight of existence, only to be met with laughter as Rowan combusted what remained of his soul and added the power to the Incarnation.

“You are the first to die, but not the last. Find solace in that, it is all I have to give.”