The Primordial Record

Chapter 1752: The Chronicler, The Rememberer, and The Quiet Watcher

Circe, the blue-haired woman, replied, “Sheba is many things, and the truth of what she is can only be known by herself and the Creator, but I think of her as a nexus.” She did not turn even while replying to the Elythrii. “In her halls, I have seen too many strange places, and I believe that what I have seen are crossroads of realities that were, that are, that might be. It is not a creation in a dimension but a structure that incorporates dimensions. Its rooms are possibilities given form, yet I don’t know why I keep finding bones…”

Circe had no idea that when Sheba was under the control of the Prism, a lot of their members had been lost inside its endless passages, and the castle had not bothered to reveal this truth to her.

“…Originally it was not like this; there was the potential, of course, and then Row… the Creator placed a seed inside of it, and everything changed.”

Communication passed between the Elythrii as they tried to reconcile the image of their creator with what they were discovering in the realm outside their own.

Although they were discovering the mysteries outside their Reality, in some ways, this was also a journey to learn about their creator.

Lyra asked the question in the hearts of all Elythrii

“Who are you, Circe? What is your relationship with the Creator?”

The blue-haired woman smiled, “You know, that is one thing that he has not bothered to answer. As always, he expects us to figure out the answers. Let’s see, well, in this place, and I will consider myself as the Chronicler. I am tasked with knowing what occurs within these walls. My companion,” she gestured to the crow circling ahead, “is the Rememberer.”

The crow, Noctis, squawked in annoyance, pecking Circe on the head, but she shooed him off,

“Noctis knows everything that has ever been forgotten. At least, in this Reality. And the other,” she glanced down at the cat now weaving between her feet, “is the Quiet Watcher. It sees what is unseen, and does not speak. Ever!”

The black cat had a look of grief on its face, but it seemed to swallow any pride before sauntering after Circe.

The Elythrii followed the woman quietly after her answer, something about her strange personality making them calm. Chloy, an Elythrii Warrior, spoke out,

“Chronicler… This place, we have never seen anything like it before. You are its… caretakers?”

“Her caretakers…” Circe corrected while offering a ghost of a smile. “We are its inhabitants. Its guests. It’s prisoners. The semantics are fluid. Sheba provides. We all serve one master.”

They arrived at a room whose door was a single, massive slab of clear quartz. Circe placed her hand on it, and it opened without a sound.

The room within was a comfortable, if ancient, study. Books lined the walls, a fire crackled in a hearth despite the lack of visible fuel, and three chairs were arranged around it. The crow, the Rememberer, alighted on a perch made of a twisted piece of driftwood. The Quiet Watcher jumped into one of the chairs and began washing itself again.

“Find somewhere to sit, and Sheba would provide you with your needs,” Circe said, gesturing to the other two chairs to make her point. “You speak of the Creator. This is a subject of… particular interest to us, especially since we don’t know what he has been up to for a while now.”

The Elythrii did not sit in the physical sense, but their light-forms condensed into chairs of coherent energy, mirroring the offer of hospitality. They did not need to demand anything from Sheba and were wary of accepting anything that had not been properly vetted.

“What do you wish to know?” Lyra asked after they had settled.

“Everything,” Circe said, her eyes gleaming in the firelight. “We are aware of the Origin Land. The Rememberer holds the memory of the first law being set on the Reality, and he has informed us that the Creator was about to do the same with his realm. For myself, I have seen the shadows of the great mechanisms—the Weavers and Anchors—as they pass through the deeper walls of my mind. I am connected to him in ways I don’t yet understand. I know the Origin Land has an architect. But I did not know his realm had a voice. Or that he created… audiences.”

For the next few hours, the Elythrii spoke. They told their story. Of Elython, of their evolution from mud to magic, of their merging of science and thaumaturgy into Etheronics, of their long journey to immortality, and their fleeting, terrifying, and glorious perceptions of the Archai. They spoke of the Fragment of Potential within them, the driving force gifted by the Primordial.

The Chronicler listened, utterly still. The Rememberer occasionally let out a soft caw, as if filing away a particularly important piece of information. The Quiet Watcher stared into the fire, its tail twitching slightly.

When the Elythrii finished, the silence in the room was profound, broken only by the crackle of the fire.

“An Experiment,” the Chronicler finally said, the word hanging in the air. “You are an experiment in conscious evolution. Designed to see if life could not only understand the laws of the cosmos but could eventually… what? Embody them? Partner with them?” She looked around the room, at the infinite castle around them. “Sheba is also a form of life. A different form. It does not evolve. It is. It does not seek to understand the laws; it incorporates them. You are a story of becoming. Sheba is a story of being.”

“There is a question on our mind, you seem to know the Creator even without being part of his realm, do you know his true origins, or does he have a creator who made him?” Kaelen asked.

Circe shook her head, a broad smile on her face, she was loving these new children of Rowan, their bravery and open-mindedness were a far cry from what any major power would allow their subjects.

“I am not sure you can necessarily create something like him. He is stranger than such concepts. I always like to think that he must be a natural phenomenon of the multiverse, a knot in the fabric of reality. We only know that he exists, and we exist within his grace.”

A faint breeze that emerged from nowhere entered this room, stirring the Lightning Kirin’s fur.

Archimedes, now called the Quiet Watcher, suddenly stood up, stretched, and hopped off the chair. It walked to a blank section of wall and sat, staring at it. A moment later, the stone shimmered and became a window.

But it was not a window to the outside. It was a window to the Elythrii’s own past. It showed a vivid scene: Lyra as a young, biological Elythrii, standing on a cliff at dawn on Elython, feeling the first true connection to the planet’s Etheric field. The memory was so personal, so private, that Lyra gasped.

The crow cackled softly. The Chronicler nodded. “The Creator shows you that it knows you. It has pulled the memory from the air, from the fabric of your own being. It is a form of greeting. And a demonstration. There are no secrets here, only unread pages.”

“We would like to learn from you,” Lyra said, recovering her composure. “And we would like to share our knowledge with you. We have held no secrets about ourselves because we believe in truths. I hope you do the same and reveal the mysteries of our past as well as yours.”

Circe seemed to consider this. “There are no issues here. Forgive me, you were brought here to learn, but I have taken advantage of your openness to seek out the truth of his hidden works. This castle, Sheba, is to be your gateway to all of Reality, and inside this place, you can learn everything you want to know about it before venturing forth.

Gesturing around, she continued, “Time is extremely malleable here, and you can spend as much as you need in peace, because I can promise you that outside of these walls, you shall find enough chaos and suffering you would go mad from it, but there is also wonder like nothing you have ever known.”

And so began the Elythrii’s stay in the infinite castle. They walked halls that bent into the fourth spatial dimension, requiring them to shift their forms to navigate. They read books in the Archives that were written in the gravitational waves of colliding black holes. They peered into rooms that were probability bubbles, showing every possible outcome of a single decision they had made millennia ago.

They learned that the Castle Algoth, which preferred the name Sheba, was not just a repository. It was a curator of reality. And they, the Elythrii, were its newest, most fascinating exhibit—and its first guests who had come by the direct invitation of the owner of the gallery itself.

When the time came for them to leave, the Chronicler, the Rememberer, and the Quiet Watcher saw them off in the same black harbor.

“You will be back,” the Chronicler said, not as a farewell, but as a statement of fact. “Sheba has added a wing for you. It is always growing.”

Their ship reconstituted itself. As they lifted off from the black stone, the castle didn’t vanish. The harbor simply receded, becoming one door among infinite doors in the endless facade of the living castle, which itself shrank to a single, glowing point in the higher-dimensional substrate before they translated away.

They had not met a race of beings. They had met a context. A living, breathing, infinite context. And they had a standing invitation to return.

The Creator’s map glowed again, highlighting a new path. This one vibrated with a frantic, creative, and chaotic energy. The next destination awaited. But the memory of the silent, knowing halls of Sheba, and its three strange inhabitants, would forever be a part of them. They had looked into the multiverse’s memory, and it had looked back.