The Primordial Record

Chapter 2122  The War At The Dawn of Ending (5)

In the timeless expanse that bridged the fractured epochs of Existence, the consciousness of Enoch stirred like a storm awakening from slumber.

Locked in the depths of time with one of the most annoying creations in Existence, the consciousness had finally been freed to rise from its cage.

The arrival of Rowan was the key to its freedom, and he had obtained that key when he tasted the first drop of Rowan’s blood, however due to his greed, Enoch had wanted more, because he saw a clear path outside the restraint of the Great Hand, but he had failed, and the arrangements he had left behind in Existence had nearly been destroyed, and so he could only follow the path laid in front of him once again, and rise so he could end all of it.

Rowan saw the shape of a boy, but his sight had been blinded from the start, and he could not see the true form of Enoch’s consciousness that resembled a vast, luminous nebula of will and memory.

He was the architect of the Cradle, the original creator whose curse had birthed the Primordials and set the canvas of Limbo ablaze. For eons, Enoch had slumbered in the past, his essence scattered across the ruins of forgotten realities, waiting for the threads of fate to weave a path forward. Now, as the painting neared its chaotic completion, those threads pulled taut, and Enoch’s grip was firm; he was tired of his endless slumber.

The ascension began in the depths of the Ninth Dimension, which was the true location of the Cradle, which was a realm of causality’s tangled knots where all lives filtered through End to find their final resting place and where every choice branched into infinities of regret.

Enoch knew that the Cradle should not exist; End should have been a force of true erasure, but the Great Hand wielded End like a well honed tool and its weapon, and every ending was packed into the Cradle, including Enoch who should have died under the drain of wielding so much power of Origin and using his essence as the brush and the paint.

There was a time he believed that he could duplicate the power of the Great Hand… he was wrong. He did not just lack the power needed, but he lacked access to something more important… and Enoch would regain that lack on his return.

Enoch’s consciousness coalesced from the ether, drawing fragments of itself from the echoes of extinct realities. Wisps of golden light, veined with the light of the Tenth’s Dimension, swirled together like rivers merging into an ocean.

The pull was inexorable, a call from the present, where the core of Origin was beginning to reach past the threshold of no return, where even Death itself had fallen, and his lost children raged in battle.

As it ascended, Enoch felt the layers of dimensions peel away like shedding skins. From the first dimension to the sixth, where the annoying parallel existences bombarded him with visions of what-might-have-beens… His victories, his fall, the Cradle unbroken, Limbo blooming with uncorrupted life.

As it ascended, Enoch felt the layers of dimensions peel away like shedding skins. From the first dimension to the sixth, where the annoying parallel existences bombarded him with visions of what-might-have-beens… His victories, his fall, the Cradle unbroken, Limbo blooming with uncorrupted life.

He refused them, his will a blade that severed the branches. He paused for a moment when the parallel existences showed him alternate Enoches, tyrants who had never cursed their creations, martyrs who had sacrificed themselves at the dawn.

Enoch was surprised that the Great Hand had fully unveiled the power of the sixth dimension before him, because he knew that this present Existence lacked this power, and so without holding back, he began to absorb the regrets, pain and fear of his alternate selves, killing them all before they even understood what was happening, and as Enoch fed, he grew denser, heavier. He spent a while absorbing all the powers of the sixth dimension that had begun to bloom in this fragile Existence until there was none left… With the present expanding nature of Existence, it would take a while for the power of Parallel Realities to return, but by then, it would be too late.

Enoch had the intuition that his act at the moment must have doomed one of his cursed children who was in battle, but he did not care; his competition had never been with them, but with something greater… he was just here to take back all that had been stolen from him.

Ascending past the sixth, he reached the seventh… consciousness, and he was flooded with the thoughts of every being in existence, from the innocent dreams of children sleeping in the Origin Realm, to the ravenous schemes of the Ancient Primordials and Eos’s weary resolve. He drank them in, his nebula-self swelling with the weight of collective minds.

He would have collected more, but the vast presence of the true form of Nyxara held him back. She was still in the depths of slumber, and if Enoch wanted to regain his true strength, he would need a body that could challenge that great thief.

15:12

Upward, or outward, for direction meant nothing here, through the Eighth dimension, where causality looped into knots. Enoch untied them with a thought, rewriting the chains that bound past to present, and his memories that should not exist anymore, reasserted themselves with a solidity that made Existence tremble.

He would have collected more, but the vast presence of the true form of Nyxara held him back. She was still in the depths of slumber, and if Enoch wanted to regain his true strength, he would need a body that could challenge that great thief.

Upward, or outward, for direction meant nothing here, through the Eighth dimension, where causality looped into knots. Enoch untied them with a thought, rewriting the chains that bound past to present, and his memories that should not exist anymore, reasserted themselves with a solidity that made Existence tremble.

The Ninth assaulted him with laws unbound, where physics twisted into madness, gravity becoming song, and time folded into origami. He navigated them like a sailor through storms, his essence a ship forged from the Cradle’s original blueprint.

His ascent should have shaken all of Existence, but Enoch had grown wiser, and he did not make any sound even as he reached the threshold.

Before he left his prison, he glanced at Rowan before he closed the gate. If Rowan had no access to the tenth dimension, he would never escape, and the Lumina growing inside his heart would be Enoch’s hidden weapon.

The present loomed like a shattered mirror before his sight, reflecting the chaos of the ongoing war. Enoch’s consciousness pierced it, emerging into the Hollow where Eos had sprung his trap. But Enoch did not manifest there. If he were him from before, he would have announced himself and revealed his light, but he did not have a body, and that child Eos was so dangerous that there was a chance that his consciousness might be seriously injured if he manifested himself inside the Hollow.

His destination was deeper, heading for the vessel that he had prepared for more than a hundred million years at this point.

It waited in a hidden fold of Existence, a chamber Eos had never known existed, woven from the Tenth Dimension’s threads and the nascent pulse of Enoch’s severed consciousness. What was not mentioned was that Eos and the Ancient Primordials had been searching for the Abomination all these while, and the Archai had been slowly combing through Existence to find the vessel of Enoch, and given a few hundred million years, there was a great possibility that the Archai could have found this body and the chance for Enoch to rise would have been greatly destabilized, but that path has now been blocked with the full return of Enoch’s consciousness.

The vessel was no mere body. It was an abomination of endless evolution. Its colossal form, born from the fusion of every failed incarnation of Enoch that had transformed into Realities, and stained with the power of End, was a thing of beauty and horror.