Chapter 1951: Breaking The Cradle (2)

Published Mar 17, 2026, 08:45 AM

Chapter 1951: Breaking The Cradle (2) REALM OF DEATH Eos needed to keep an eye on the ongoing battle in the Realm of Death, as much depended on its progress, and it was crucial for him to know the right time to intervene or if he should intervene in the first place. Death was hiding a lot of secrets from him, and Eos did not know if this enigmatic being might be a worse enemy to him than the Primordials. While his New primordials knew that a huge battle was ongoing between the Beast of Final Rest and the Ancient Primordials, Eos had not given them all the details he was gathering from the fourteen Archai he had sent to spectate this battle. They had remained at a distance, not daring to capture much data, but only sift through the ashes after the fight had passed through that area. The Primordials were so perceptive that they would know if they were being watched, and even sifting through the detritus of their battle carried a risk of discovery, since there were remnants of their Will in everything they touched. However, his Archais were made to break certain rules, and could have safely watched the battles between the Primordials and Death, but Rowan respected his enemies and their capacity to surprise him, and he would rather err on the side of caution. The battle scars that his Archai read like a book had been of great help to Eos, as everything he was learning from was exposing him to the highest level of battle, and for someone like him, he was evolving as he watched everything. Still, his ability to know how this battle was ongoing in a precise manner had been reduced when Elgorath punched through countless Regions of Death, followed by his siblings, but Death did something that was out of his expectations when it closed the wound left by the Primordials behind them. The Beast collapsed the outer billion Regions into a single, perfectly smooth sphere of what the Archai could only call compressed oblivion, and the seven Primordials found themselves sealed inside a hollow sphere whose inner surface was made of every death they had just caused, turned inside-out and looking back at them. Death had turned its own skin into a cage. ® Inside the sphere, Asteroath, Primordial Light tried to burn a hole through the sphere. The Primordials were pushing deeper into the Realm of Death, but he was not comfortable with being covered by the domain of the Beast. His white wings flared to their brightest yet, as a lance of revelation that should have unmade the sphere the same way it had unmade the outer Regions of Death erupted from his wings. The intensity of this blast should have torn the sphere in two; instead, the sphere drank the light. Every photon was caught, inverted, and fired back as a needle of anti-revelation that struck Asteroath through the heart of his concept. For the first time, the Primordials halted their march forward as they looked at Light, who was bleeding pure darkness and was frozen in pain as his face twisted in true pain. The wound did not close. It widened, slowly, like a second mouth. For a Primordial to experience true pain that no mortal or immortal could comprehend, their concept had to be broken, and Death had used the perfect weapon against Light, as he suffered from his hubris. Xyris’s eyes widened in shock at the damage done to Asteroath, and not willing to hear the pained gasp from his brother, he attempted to roll the sphere backward along its own timeline in order to return it to the moment before it closed. If he did this, the concept that had grievously injured Light would cease to exist, as Xyris essentially robbed death of the foundation of its attack. A purple wave of Time Origin blasted out from his wings, but Death answered by erasing the concept of "before" inside the sphere. Time became a single, flat instant that repeated itself forever. A mighty humming sound began to reverberate inside this sphere as the contest between Origin power was growing between Death and Xyris, but inside the Realm of Death, its power was the greatest, and since the Primordials were no longer fused as one, Death was able to prevail in this clash, as Xyris was blasted backwards. Xyris aged a trillion subjective years in the space between two heartbeats, his purple wings sloughing off in sheets until only bone and regret remained. The eyes of the Primordials met each other as they understood what the Beast had done. It had turned the war from a siege into a digestion. The sphere was a stomach, and they were the meal. Elgorath wanted to attack, but Nyxara held him back, and she gathered her siblings into a circle, wings interlaced, "We do not break out; doing so only plays to the Beast’s advantage. We eat our way deeper. Every layer we devour is one less layer the Beast can use to smother us. We will digest Death from the inside until there is nothing left to digest us with. We are in the place of its greatest strength but also its greatest weakness.... This battle can quickly be decided if we follow this path, but not all of us may make it..." She waited for a response, but the Primordials gave it by their actions as Elgorath, no longer trying to force his way out, turned to the dead amassing in impossible numbers in front of them and unleashed memories he had stolen from them. Elgorath forced the dead to remember the taste of sunlight. As trillions of soul-fires flared with stolen warmth, they discovered that the memories refused to end. When it grew beyond their capacity to understand, they burst like overripe fruit. The Primordials drank from their light even though the essence of Death inside this light burned their throats. In this battle, they were determined to win by any means necessary. 𝐟𝗿𝐞𝚎𝚠𝐞𝚋𝕟𝐨𝚟𝐞𝕝.𝕔𝕠𝚖 Vorthas grew new flesh on the dead just so he could tear it off again and feed the raw life-force to his brothers and sister. He could slow down the breakdown of their bodies, and he set to this task with grim focus. Xylos turned entire legions into demons that devoured their own ranks, then devoured each other, leaving vast mountains of tainted flesh that even Death struggled to process, and Eldrithor rolled the dice of probability until entire flanks annihilated themselves in chains of impossible accident. The Primordials fought with madness, with no regard to their lives, and the stomach-cage stretched, thinned, and finally tore. They spilled out into the second layer of Death’s Realm, and the Beast welcomed them with its fury and cold laughter, revealing to them that it had created a place where gravity was grief and every footstep cost a memory. Like it or not, the Beast of Final Rest was Death itself, and it was the greatest bringer of the end in all of existence. Only the Primordials could challenge it, but they were paying a heavy price. Asteroath’s wound had grown so wide that half his chest was simply missing, replaced by a slow vortex of darkness. He flew anyway, leading the charge, white wings beating with the stubbornness of a star that refused to go supernova. If he was going to die, it would be in front of his siblings. The shell that blocked their retreat had isolated the Primordials, and they did not know that in the Cradle of Enoch, a massive change was taking place.

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