The Primordial Record

Chapter 2027  The Soulwraiths And The Abyssal Broods

The six Ancient Primordials had been searching Limbo for hundreds of thousands of years, and finally, a million years after the Agreement made with Eos, they discovered the place they were looking for… their home.

It had taken them this long to find this place because this land was no longer a place, but a blackened scar in Limbo, with obsidian plains stretching under a sky of perpetual eclipse, lit only by the sickly green auroras of their own lingering madness. A madness that only grew the deeper the Primordials fell into depravity.

This realm had become cursed because it was the place that birthed them, and even Limbo could not assimilate the toxic nature of this place and all it signified

They did not want to return here because they could sense the remnants of their father’s touch on this place, but if they were to forge an army powerful enough to stand against Eos and all that he stood for… the child that had once been their hope and now their executioner, then they would need to make uncomfortable decisions.

Nyxara looked around them, and she laughed, “He said our time had passed and we are corrupted freaks not worthy of End or Origin… I will pull out his tongue and make him suffer for all eternity. On this land, we shall create an army born from every atrocity we have ever committed, every Origin Force that we have seized, and they shall be bound by every drop of Asteroath’s dying light in my wings. My brothers, grant me your strength so I can create… monsters.”

Knowing that her creation would be central to their efforts, the other Primordials gave Nyxara their essence, and she rose into the air. They took one look at her before they scattered into various directions; this scar in Limbo was vast, and they also had their armies to create.

Nyxara stood alone as she digested the powers she had collected from her siblings. Her wings had transformed, parts of her feather carrying the colors of Origin now in her body, the black of the soul, the weird color fro her hybrid assimilation of Asteroath’s light, green from Vorthas’s Life Origin, purple from Xyris, golden from Elgorath’s fading memories and she stretched out her wings until they blotted out the cancerous auroras in this place.

She reached into her core and tore free a fragment of every soul she had ever harvested, and they were a lot. It took her centuries to do this, and then she took the screams of murdered Realities, the despair of betrayed gods, the hollow longing of extinct species. These she wove into the first monstrosities: the Soulwraiths.

Each Soulwraith was a humanoid silhouette of translucent black mist, seven feet tall, with no face, only a swirling vortex where a mouth should be. Their bodies constantly shifted: one moment a lover’s embrace frozen in agony, the next a child’s hand reaching for a parent who had already died. They moved without sound, but their presence induced existential dread so profound that weaker minds simply forgot how to breathe.

Nyxara had seen the Archai of Eos, and she had been jealous of this creation from the day she saw them. These wraiths would be her answer to those creatures, and she would see them all perish before their endless wrath. Nyxara birthed ten thousand in the first week.

This number was the greatest she could create, as much as she hated Eos, he still spoke the truth; they were no longer beings of creation, as their actions had slowly burned out those talents away from them. It could be argued that what Nyxara had done was not creation, and she was simply manifesting the madness inside her and her siblings and giving it new forms.

However, it did not matter that the Primordials had these limitations when they had the tools that could aid them in these tasks. And so, from her shadows, Nyxara drew out several realms and threw the Soulwraith inside them.

A Primordial was a massive entity, even though beside Eos, they appeared small; it was not their fault. Everything else was small beside Eos. The size of a Primordial meant that there could be a billion universes existing on a strand of their hair, and Nyxara still kept countless realms alive around her, not to nurture them, but because she did not care. New Realms grew and died around her all the time, but in moments like these, they could prove useful.

Before sending the Soulwraiths into the realms, she fed them Asteroath’s lingering light, twisting it into pale, mocking glows that would illuminate their victims’ worst memories before devouring them.

This was the reason she released them into that realm, for them to feed, grow, and multiply.

A Soulwraith did not kill quickly; it forced its prey to relive every betrayal, every failure, every moment of self-loathing until the soul unraveled like wet thread. Then it drank the fragments, growing taller and more defined until it resembled the victim it had just erased. It was a horrific way to die by any metric, and mortals and immortals easily fell to them.

By day 77, the Soulwraiths numbered in the millions, and they flew out of the devoiured realms, forming living shadows that followed Nyxara like a cloak, whispering temptations of suicide and surrender. Sparks of light began to bloom and fade around the Primordial, and each spark represented a realm being devoured. All of these realms had been like fleas on Nyxara’s back, and now their lives were being used as fuel to create her armies. In a year, the Soulwraiths numbered in billions, and this was just the beginning; the Primordials had potentially billions of years to prepare for this war.

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Xylos, Primordial Demon, watched Nyxara rise to the heavens to create her armies among the corrupted auroras, and so he chose to descend into the deepest chasms, where the bedrock of this scar had melted into lakes of liquid shadow. He dove into these abysses, his black wings shedding feathers that became seeds of corruption.

From his demonic essence, amplified by the countless eras of turning dead into traitors, he forged the Abyssal Brood. If Eos were here, he would have thought they resembled the Blood Morts, creatures he had seen in the Underverse in the past, and there was a reason for this resemblance.

The Abyssal Brood were not single creatures but living plagues. Each Brood began as a fist-sized orb of writhing black ichor. Like Nyxara, Xylos began to increase its number by hurling them into living realms where they exploded into massive hordes of insectile horrors.

Their chitinous bodies were the size of wolves, mandibles dripping venom that dissolved not flesh but will. A single sting induced hallucinations of infinite betrayal, loved ones turning into demons, and gods laughing at mortal suffering.

Victims clawed their own eyes out to stop seeing the visions, only for the venom to regrow new eyes that saw worse.

Over time, the Brood evolved. The longer they fed on fear, the larger they grew, merging into Brood Titans, which were colossal amalgamations of thousands of smaller demons.

Their bodies fused into hulking, multi-limbed behemoths with hundreds of screaming mouths. These Titans exhaled clouds of microscopic demons that burrowed into lungs, whispering corruption until the host became a new Brood nucleus.

Xylos laughed as he birthed legions from his wings. “Let Eos see what happens when hope is devoured from within. His Origin Realm shall fall, and I shall kill him with my own hands.”

As the years passed, the chasm turned into a breeding ground as Xylos kept reaching into Limbo and dragging living realms into the abyss. The Brood numbers could soon not be counted; they were a living carpet that blackened the horizon.