The Primordial Record

Chapter 2172  To Sacrifice Everything

Mira, the crystalline Primordial of Fire and Mystery, found herself standing on a world she had left behind a billion years ago. The sky was the color of amethyst, and the twin moons were rising, and somewhere in the distance, a young girl was laughing at the gentle words of a man who stood beside her.

She had been that girl, once. Before the wars, before the loss, before she had become something that could no longer remember what it felt like to run through fields of singing grass with the wind in her hair and the voice of the boy you loved whispering in your ears.

And in this light, this distant memory no longer seems as distant, as she felt a warm hand on her shoulder, and even the faint smell of the man she loved… it was almost as if she could turn around and see him, but she was too scared to do this.

‘I am with you always, even in death.’

“How…” she whispered, and the memory faded, but not completely. It left behind something she had thought lost forever…warmth.

Around her, other Primordials were experiencing the same thing. Warriors who had forgotten why they fought were remembering the faces of those they had protected.

 Strategists who had reduced armies to numbers were feeling the weight of each life they had spent. Beings who had become gods were remembering what it was like to be human.

And in that remembering, they found something they had been searching for since the first day of the war… purpose.

A purpose that the vast presence of Enoch had stolen from them.

They all knew that this battle, their struggles, was not a waste.

In this moment, they were the true heirs of Existence; they were its dreams and its aspirations.

There was a mortal saying that men are the dreams of the universe, but now, they all understood that they all were the dreams of Existence, they were its soul.

Eos had done something crazy… while Enoch had expended his body to expand Existence… Eos had sacrificed his soul to give Existence one.

From the beginning, he had always been looking for a way to level the playing field.

His enemies were too old and powerful; they had too many advantages, and he had so little, or perhaps that was what they wanted him to think.

Eos had sat and decided that the only way to move forward was to create something new, but the only problem was that his enemies were too old, and what he saw as new was nothing before them, because before him, there would have surely been another genius in the past who would have thought of his idea.

It was not as if Eos did not believe in his ingenuity or his potential for new creation, but he needed a lot of time for him to be able to achieve such a feat.

And so the more he thought about this, the more he realized that the only way forward was to use the strengths of his enemies against them.

What did he know about the Luminious? They were ruthless, cunning, and incredibly destructive.

They saw all of Existence as a playground, and they broke it again and again just to harvest whatever benefits they could from it.

With all of that in mind, Eos realized that the one thing he had found that they were missing, the only weakness they had was their lack of compassion.

In many cases, this could not even be considered a weakness. Who would show compassion to an enemy or an ant?

The Luminious saw all life as ants and only their bloodline was supreme, and so, Eos understood that the one thing they would not understand was the ability for such worthless creatures to sacrifice power for the sake of others.

No Luminious had ever given their life for another, and they would not know what it meant to be able to do such a thing.

They would never imagine that Eos would be able to sacrifice his soul to give Existence life.

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The light of Eos’s soul was the light of Origin’s Soul, and it was still young and unformed.

Most of its knowledge came from Eos, and for the moment, it was only moving via instincts.

This light reached up and touched the breach that Enoch had torn all the way from the Blackened Scar to the Origin Realms, and this tear seemed to recoil from the light.

Existence itself was banishing Enoch from it.

The countless horde that was emerging from the Blackened Scar felt and saw the light of Existence’s soul, and they began to change.

Born with the only purpose to kill and destroy, this was the first time that any of these creatures had ever felt warmth.

The Soulwraiths that had been pouring through the breach paused in their advance, their faceless forms turning toward the light.

For the first time in their existence, they were not hungry; instead, they felt something that even their creators could not have imagined: they felt… curiosity. The Chronophages slowed, their clockwork bodies ticking to a halt as the light washed over them. The stolen moments they had consumed began to leak from their forms.

They no longer saw the screams and agonies of those they had consumed; now they were seeing stories, births, deaths, first kisses, and last words.

 All the moments that made a life worth living, spilling into the void like stars being born.

And the Memorivores, the golden specters who fed on guilt and shame, found themselves remembering things that had never happened to them.

Acts of kindness, moments of grace, sacrifices made without expectation of reward. They did not know what to do with these memories because they had never been designed to hold them.

But they held them anyway.

The Ancient Primordials may have created these monsters, but the truth was that these were all the reflections of Enoch’s Will, and he felt all these transformations like a slap in his face.

Enoch watched his armies hesitate, and the spiral galaxies of End in his eyes began to spin faster with fury.

“Do you think this changes anything?” His voice cracked across the void, and the Soulwraiths that had paused screamed, their forms twisting back into shapes of hunger and despair. The Chronophages’ stolen moments burst from them like bile, and the Memorivores shattered the memories they had just begun to cherish, grinding them back into guilt and shame.

“You think your light can undo what I have made?”

Enoch’s hands, still gripping the edges of the breach, began to pull so that he would anchor himself and plant his feet in the fabric of Existence.

“I am not your enemy, child of Eos. I am your end.”

And with those words, Enoch pushed himself into Existence.