Chapter 1913: Falling With Folded Wings (1) The armies of the dead were made to be invincible and unrelenting, the un-life that beat in the center of their chest was supposed to provide the armies of the dead with infinite vitality, and battling them would be like striking at water hoping it would bleed, but nothing in existence were meant to withstand the onslaught of Primordials, and the Incarnation of Rowan inside the Cradle of Enoch would understand that this was partly due to the origins of the Primordials that predated the birth of Limbo and existence as a whole. Their moves, which tore through existence, carried a power that the Beast of Final Rest could not understand, but one thing it had going for it was the fact that its armies and his deathly regions could be regarded as infinite. It may have torn off a portion of its Will to discard the corruption from Xylos’s attacks, but that did not hamper its power, more regions emerged from nothing and his armies further swelled. This battle on the surface may resemble one of attrition, but it went far deeper than this, and only Primordials would be able to understand the intricacies of the battle that went far deeper than it appears. In the shifting mass of bodies and wings that the Primordials had become, a large hand seized Xylos by the neck and pushed him down, and Eldrithor emerged laughing. His laughter was the sound of collapsing probability. The sound was like a shriek being played in reverse. Eldrithor’s voice reached into the possible and pulled out the version of existence where Death’s vanguard had already lost. He was chaos and disorder, and yet, in their present form, Eldrithor could use order to command chaos. And his voice rippled across countless regions of Death, and in one glorious instant, the dead knelt in surrender. Eldrithor had reached into their minds, and they no longer served the Beast of Final Rest, but the Primordials. "Destroy yourselves..." the voice said, and every single soldier in the army of Death began to turn their power inward... if Eldrithor were to succeed, then he would have wiped out every un-life in the infinite regions of Death. However, the scale of what he was about to do, even for a Primordial as powerful as him, caused a slight delay in the reaction from the armies of Death, giving the Beast of Final Rest the chance to respond to this threat. The Beast spoke a single syllable of inevitability, and the false history shattered like a mirror, freeing up his armies, and for the first time since the war began, the armies of Death started to roar with rage. The backlash struck Eldrithor like a billion mirrors breaking inside his essence; shards of unrealized futures slashed his chaotic wings until storm-colored blood rained across the void. He screamed with equal pain and pleasure, and harsh laughter emerged from the mouths of the other Primordials. "Eldrithor, you always believe that you can fly even without wings, you did not go for half." Xyris chuckled. Eldrithor was still stunned and could not respond to the taunt from his brother, who pushed him downwards so he could come to the fore. Xyris looked at the roaring armies of Death whose number had not changed since the battle began, and he snapped his fingers and aged the next wave of attackers a trillion Cosmic Eras in advance. Even though the lifespan of the dead was considered to be nigh infinite, in the higher dimension, infinite had a limit, and even the dead could not survive this incredible passage of time that had been unleashed upon them. Even the lifespan of Limbo was not equal to a fraction of this amount. Skeletal colossi flash-decayed into cosmic dust, their scythes rusted to nothing before they could swing. Hundreds of millions of regions of Death collapsed into ashes, and the reverberations of time swept across the battlefield, reducing the power of all the armies of Death by a third. But Death was no longer sitting back and watching its armies be shattered. After Eldrithor had nearly ended its entire dominion with his voice, the Beast of Final Rest began to actively use his army as an extension of his Will, and despite the powers of the Primordials multiplying in their fused form, Death in his domain was powerful beyond all common sense. Its Will pushed through the snap of Xyris and simply un-aged his armies, rolling time backward along their worldlines until they stood pristine and furious once more. In any other place, what it had done would have been impossible, but he was inside his domain, and his Will was invincible. He crushed the time of the Primordial and injected his rage into his armies. The recoil slammed into Xyris and stole the color from half his purple wings; they hung gray and brittle, flaking into frozen yesterdays. And now Eldrithor had recovered, and he began to laugh. "The guard of the Beast is now up, Xyris. You have to do better than this." Growling with frustration, Xyris allowed himself to be pushed down so that Elgorath could take charge, and none of the hands of the other Primordials held him back; in fact, they were pushing him forward, and he emerged a being of golden beauty out of a mass of horror. Elgorath spread golden wings wide, and his radiance was echoed through the armies of the dead, and it forced the dead to remember joy. Trillions of soul-fires flickered as forgotten names, lovers, creations, and songs returned to them. An entire flank of the army hesitated, weapons lowering. Some dropped their scythes and reached toward phantom families. For one terrible, merciful moment, the war paused on a knife-edge of impossible redemption. "Yes, remember all you have lost, and then lose them again!" The Beast of Final Rest would not allow this to continue, as its consciousness pulsed with icy focus, it knew that these were all testing shots fired by the Primordials, but their danger could not be underestimated. It burned the memories from the dead out a second time, hotter and cleaner than the first when their souls entered its domain after they left the mortal coil. The hesitating dead flash-calcified into statues of black glass, then detonated into shrapnel that scythes that curved unerringly toward Elgorath, directed by the Will of Death. Elgorath’s eyes widened in surprise as he folded his wings into a sun-shield; the shrapnel struck and lodged there, each piece a stolen happiness now made into a nail. His golden light dimmed as though eclipsed from within, and he was rebuffed into the fold of bodies. Like a silver phantom, Vorthas walked through the bodies of the Primordials, but he was still connected to them by what resembled an umbilical cord made of shadows. He stepped forward alone through the maelstrom of golden memories that was raining down like meteors, yet none was able to touch him. Where his feet touched the newly formed battlefield of compressed corpses, green fire raced outward in root systems of pure life. Bone sprouted muscle, muscle grew hearts, hearts beat once with desperate hope before Vorthas crushed them again with his own hands, and like a cancer, the effect of his power began to spread. He was denying the Beast its harvest, killing the dead a second time so thoroughly they could never be reclaimed, and Death took a moment to respond before pouring out his essence onto the battlefield. Vorthas was life, and Death knew that its power was the best weapon against this Primordial; they were both their greatest weaknesses. Vorthas grinned when he felt the power of Death connect through the spreading root systems he had placed upon the battlefield, and he accepted the power, if it meant his reach could not be severed. He continued walking forward, each murder of the dead costing him. Tumors of wild growth blossomed across his green wings, his feathers splitting into bark and cancerous leaves.