The Primordial Record

Chapter 2107  You Did Not Consider My Appetites

The Beast was an ancient monster, and it was able to decipher certain clues with the limited information presented to it. Knowing that Eos would not want to allow his secrets be known to others, Death finally acknowledged that it would not be leaving here alive.

There was a reason it feared the Temple of End, far more than it feared Eos or the Ancient Primordials, and that was because they were capable of wielding powers beyond what anyone with Origin was capable of, and if they wanted, they could erase an entity in its entirety.

For so long, Death had been feeding on the past Deaths, and he knew that this technique he was using was a small taste of what the Temple was capable of. In essence, all of these past Deaths had a slim chance of resurrection, but with this technique, they had finally been wiped out and used to feed its growth and hunger.

Now, the same thing was happening to it, and this brought panic and fear. The entire dissolution of its being for an entity that had lived beyond all things was a fear that was hard to acknowledge, and with the surging strength of a being that was on the brink of death, the Beast fought back with everything it had, and there was a surprising amount of strength left in its body.

Even when it was dying, the Beast had preserved a large amount of his strength in case it was unexpectedly betrayed by Eos. The amount of power it had kept back should have been enough to battle against one of the Ancient Primordials on equal footing, and it should have been enough to hold back Eos and escape, but the attack from Eos was beyond anything the Beast could have expected, and yet, it still fought back as hard as it could.

Tendrils lashed out, slicing across Eos’s shoulders and chest, carving deep, burning gashes that wept golden blood. One tendril speared through his thigh, pinning him momentarily. Pain lanced through Eos like white fire, but he did not flinch. He twisted his hands deeper, forcing the Beast’s own finality back upon itself.

The Beast’s screams became wet, gurgling pleas. Its form shrank from nebula-sized horror to a thrashing mass the size of a dying star, then smaller still, until it resembled a small black deer whose fur was slowly molting into ash, and eyes cracking like glass and weeping the red blood of a mortal.

Eos leaned in close, voice low and brutal.

“I warned you of their appetite, and you did not listen, a shame that you did not consider my own. This entire fucking game has gone too far. The lives inside Existence matter to me, and I shall wipe all of you away from the board, one by one.”

With a final surge, he flooded the Beast with the light of his Origin Land that effectively crippled it at the core; it was not enough to kill it, but enough to leave it on the razor’s edge of dissipation.

The Beast collapsed, twitching, leaking Origin Force in great, pulsing waves that spread across the realm like blood in water. Its final cry echoed outward, a dying emanation so potent that every higher being in existence would have felt it as a physical blow, but Eos gathered that cry and held it in his hand.

The trap was set, and he was about to send a part of this cry to Nyxara for her to draw in her prey when he turned to the Beast that resembled a helpless deer, and he broke off a piece of his destroyer, and then drove the shard of the blade through the top of the Beast’s head so it burst out from under its neck, effectively nailing shut the mouth of the Beast.

He had shown the Beast too much of his secrets, and when the real trap was sprung, he was not going to allow the Beast to bleat out any secret.

Maybe once he had been willing to work with Nyxara to gather all that was left of the Ancient Origin Force, but now that he understood that he had been deceived on two of the dimensions that he knew about, he was no longer willing to wait.

The Painter was tightening their hold over Existence, and whether the Ancient Primordials knew it or not, they were essential to the Painter’s plot. It was time to begin taking them out of the board.

㉫

Far away, in the Shattered Cradle, Nyxara, who sat on a throne of the souls of screaming Primordials, blinked. Inside one of her domains was the death cries of the Beast of Final Rest.

She paused for a moment as she analyzed the cries of the Beast, surprise, and a bit of annoyance in her eyes.

Eos had been able to do what the six of them combined could not, and despite the fact that their situation was different from his own, it painted a stark picture about the state of the Ancient Primordials; they were falling.

From the moment that Existence began to expand outside all known boundaries and the birth of the fifth layer of Space, the inevitable fall of the Ancient Primordials had been set in motion, and Nyxara could see that… and she hated it.

They had spent so long in madness, waiting for the day when everything would change, and now that they were free, now that it was their turn to rule all of Existence, it was becoming broken.

“Well, no more…” Nyxara swore to herself. The truth was that after she digested all the scattered forces of Origin inside her body and those of Light, the fusion of these two Origins had pushed her might to ridiculous levels.

She did not need the death of two Primordials to push her beyond the limit; she only needed one, and once that was done, she would slaughter everything in sight, including Eos.

Nyxara wanted ultimate power, but she was not foolish. With the expansion of Existence, the fragile control that the Primordial had over Existence was slipping away, and it was hubris to think they still had this situation under control.

The fact that Eos could threaten them with the Origin Realms and they ran back like little mice to their burrows was more than enough evidence to show that they had no proper way to respond to the changes that were happening.