The Primordial Record

Chapter 1726: Specters and Echoes

The voices were cold and carried a note of cruelty that was deeply pervasive, and although it sounded as if they were talking beside his ears, he could hear them all throughout the entire length of the Echoing Corridors.

Rowan remained silent as his perception pulsed rhythmically in his attempt to decipher the position of these voices. As long as he was holding the Soul Spiders, slowing down the rate at which they destroyed the corridors, he did not care what these voices were saying when he had the time to hunt them down.

“Why do you think that everything would always go the way you want?… You are no longer in your place of power anymore; you are in the realm of dissolution.”

Rowan closed his eyes and pushed deeper into his search. Every moment that went by, he reviewed and dismissed billions of options until he found what he was looking for, and his eyes flew open. ” Echoes indeed,” he whispered, and with a thought, the hands holding all the Soul Spiders flicked one of their fingers and crushed the heads of these creatures, stopping their awful shrieks and returning silence to the corridors.

Something flashed across the walls so fast that only Rowan’s impossible perception was able to grab a hold of it.

Existing in the barest moment where the sound of memory was born and destroyed, there were four figures who had appeared in the walls of the Endless Corridors, and as soon as Rowan saw their figures, his Will began dragging them out of the realm of nonexistence.

The Soul Spiders in his grasp were shuddering, on the verge of death. They may be immortal, but they were incredibly fragile, and Rowan began to devour these spiders quickly.

A small part of him acknowledged that his ability to devour was turning out to be a more versatile tool than he initially anticipated. Instead of slowly deciphering the mysteries of the Echoing Corridors, he would fully inherit them.

While doing this, Rowan had not forgotten the danger, as he began to slowly bring out these four figures hidden inside the echoes. They were slippery, their nature tending more towards nonexistence than existence.

Still, Rowan was used to wrestling with forces more slippery than this, and he slowly drew out what was hidden inside the walls. Of the four presences he had glimpsed, he slowly drew out the first.

It was a weeping child, curled in a dark corner, clutching a dying star that flickers in time with his sobs. Surrounding the weeping child were bleeding planets; it would seem that the slaughter that had been ongoing on these worlds was so terrible that it had overfilled the limits of the worlds and began to spill over.

The weeping child stopped whimpering, head slowly turning towards Rowan with blood pouring down his face,

“I never asked for this. I just wanted to create beauty.”

Saying that he cradled the dying star and continued weeping. Rowan regarded this sight for a while and looked to another corner where another presence was being revealed.

He saw a window, with a thin man with glowing brown skin and eyes as bright as stars looking through this window with avid fascination. The man did not acknowledge his presence, his focus not leaving the window for a moment as he watched whatever was outside with detached academic interest.

He could see reflections of light flickering across the windows and bouncing off the man’s eyes, and those lights had the colors of death and destruction.

Rowan’s perception swept past the man and looked into the window to see what had enraptured his senses, and he saw the end of realities. Great flames burning hotter and brighter than any flames should devour dimensions, and great beasts swallowed what was left.

The silent man turned towards Rowan, eyes utterly devoid of any shred of compassion, and he said,

“Intervention is chaos. Observation is order. Let them all end, it is a fascinating data point.”

With those words, he turned back to the window and continued observing the end of realities.

The third presence revealed itself, and it was in a throneroom. A man sat on a throne of broken divine spines, encased in armor of conquered realms. His throneroom was awashed in iron and blood, and he radiated absolute, terrifying authority.

His armor creaked as he turned towards Rowan, his deep voice rumbling,

“Why show mercy? Power is the only truth.”

The last presence could easily escape notice, and Rowan discovered that she had appeared first, but because her aura was so unremarkable, she had escaped his sight until he was done observing the first three.

She was a mortal woman, wearing a faded robe and sitting on a brown, dead grass field. She was looking in the distance but seeing nothing; a heavy air of desolation was surrounding her. Something about the way she sat made Rowan believe that she had been in the same position for a long time, and all the while she had been speaking,

“Was it worth it? Do you even remember the feeling of sunlight on skin that could truly feel?”

Rowan took a step back; the feeling of wrongness that had been growing in his heart, unknowningly, exploded, and he realized that he had missed something important.

The four presences suddenly vanished, and when they reappeared, they now lived inside the light of Rowan’s eyes.

The rusty armor of the conqueror covered his body before flickering away. It returned once more and vanished as Rowan’s Will fought against this invasion. Tears of blood poured from his eyes, and a dying star appeared above his head, and a dead field below his feet.

Rowan’s consciousness began to warp as four different consciousnesses started to fight to take over who he was.

He had long expected a trial like this, because Rowan knew that the exploration of Origin was a battle to understand oneself, for without a Will that was unbreakable, no one could wield the power of Origin, and yet he had still made a mistake…

This was not the first Reality that Primordial Soul had conquered, and in those Realities she had devoured, some remnants still remained inside of her, too special or too stubborn to easily perish. He had just been attacked by four of these specters.