Chapter 1785: The End of Infinity The pale man did not struggle as Rowan reached him. He should have, but he did not. The fight, the flight, the desperate bargains—all of it had bled out of him, leaving behind a shell of absolute comprehension. Eldrithor knelt on the cold, black volcanic rock, the rough texture biting into his bony knees. His head was bowed, not in submission, but in a final, exhausted acknowledgment of the geometry of his fate, knowing that the altar before him was not just stone; it was a destination. ’How could my end be like this?’ He could feel the silent, screaming resonance of Primordial Soul’s unmaking soaking the air, a psychic patina of absolute violation that made his new, fragile form want to vomit. This was the place. There would be no other. This was a place where Primordials were butchered. Rowan’s shadow fell over him, not blocking a light source, but imposing a deeper darkness upon the gloom. He did not speak. Words were for beings who dealt in possibilities. Here, there was only the inevitable. Eldrithor wished he had; perhaps it might have reduced the fear in his heart, but Rowan was silent. A long, pale, trembling finger reached out and touched the edge of the altar. The man who was Chaos flinched from the memory imprinted in the stone. It was a memory of screaming. Not a sound, but the idea of a sound being erased. He knew what was coming. The knowledge was a cold stone in his gut. The hammer. The simple, brutal, final tool. The blade Rowan used on his immortal flesh was for precise unmaking, for the severing of concepts. This... this was for something else. This was for punishment. This was for annihilation of the physical vessel with a brutality that echoed through every level of being. With a strength that seemed to leech the last warmth from the void, Rowan’s hands closed around the pale man’s upper arms. The grip was not fierce; it was inexorable, like the closing of a tectonic plate. He was lifted with an ease that was itself a form of contempt. This infinite being, now, weighed so little. He was laid upon the altar. The black stone was freezing against his back, a cold that seeped into his spine and seemed to drink the feeble heat of his stolen life. The rough-hewn surface scraped his skin raw, and Eldrithor felt goosebumps on his skin. He stared up at the formless, twilight-grey void that served as a sky in this non-place. His star-and-void eyes were wide, unblinking, seeing not the emptiness above but the terrifying certainty of the figure standing over him. Rowan looked down on Primordial Chaos before a black helm snapped shut over his face, leaving only his eyes open, and then he picked up the hammer. It was heavier than a mountain and as light as a thought. The pitted iron head seemed to suck in the faint light, a promise of impact. The dark wood of the haft was smooth from use. There was no wind-up. No dramatic pause. There was only the efficient, economic motion of a craftsman beginning his work. The hammer fell. It struck the pale man’s right kneecap. The sound was not a crack. It was a wet, thick, pulverizing crunch, a sickeningly intimate noise of calcium and cartilage being reduced to paste under infinite pressure. "BOOM – CRUNCH." The pale man’s body did not just jerk; it convulsed, a violent, electric spasm of agony that arched his back off the cold stone. A sound was ripped from his throat—a high, thin, breathless shriek that was utterly, pathetically mortal. Primordial Chaos had loved pain, but this was a pain in an immortal body that knew no limits and could not end, here this pain was final and there was nothing to shield his mind from the inevitability of his eventual fate. The pain was a white-hot supernova in his nervous system, so vast and all-consuming it felt like his entire being had been compressed into that one, shattered point. He did not want to, but he looked down, his vision swimming, and saw the ruin of his knee. It was no longer a joint. It was a crater of meat and splintered bone, a grotesque blossom of crimson that seemed obscenely bright against the monochrome grey and black of the landscape. The leg was bent at an impossible angle, the foot twitching spastically. A dull moan emerged from his throat at this moment, and he did not even know he was making it. But he did not pass out. His form, though frail, was still woven from the essence of a Primordial. His biology, his very capacity to experience, was not human. He could not escape into unconsciousness. His mind was built to process the birth and death of Realities; it could process, catalog, and endure this agony with terrifying clarity. He was condemned to feel every infinite second of it. Rowan watched Eldrithor, his expression hidden behind his helm, but his stance was that of a stone monolith. He raised the hammer again. The second blow came down on the left elbow. This time, the sound was sharper, a SNAP-POP as the joint hyperextended and then exploded outward. The bone, the ulna, splintered and tore through the fish-belly white skin, a jagged, bloody spear of ivory. The arm flopped, useless, connected by strands of torn tendon and muscle that writhed like dying worms. The pale man’s shriek escalated into a continuous, breathless keen, a sound of pure, undiluted sensory overload. When he had killed Primordial Soul on this altar, he had been frenzied and filled with wrath, making his hammer blows to seek her death in an efficient manner. At that time, he had not processed his loss, and his heart was still filled with fire, but now that his mind was calm, his vengeance was cold. For the beings who treated all life as disposable trash, their karma was him holding this hammer. Primordial Soul died first, and she was the lucky one. ® Rowan worked with a dreadful, methodical pace. He was not enraged. He was not frenzied. He was a sculptor of pain, an architect of ruin. The hammer rose and fell. It shattered the other knee, reducing both legs to bags of bone chips and pulverized meat. It crashed down on the shoulders, collapsing the clavicles with wet, grating crunches, driving the broken ends into the soft tissue beneath. It methodically broke the bones of the hands and feet, each finger and each toe receiving a precise, obliterating tap, reducing them to red mush in the shape of digits. The pale man was no longer screaming coherently. His voice had given out, shredded by the relentless tide of agony. What emerged was a wet, gurgling rasp, a sound of a drowning man being systematically disassembled. His body was a map of ruin, a grotesque parody of the human form he had chosen. Blood, a shocking, vibrant red, pooled on the black altar, dripping over the edges to be thirstily absorbed by the grey ash below. It steamed faintly in the cold, the last vestige of his stolen warmth fleeing into the void. But he lived. His eyes, those windows to the cosmos, were wide with a horror that transcended pain. It was the horror of comprehension, of watching his own physical reality be unmade with a crude, physical tool. The hammer was not just breaking his body; it was breaking his concept of self. Each blow was a lesson in mortality, taught with brutal, unambiguous force. He tried to speak, to beg for a mercy he knew would not come. His jaw, shattered and hanging loose, could only manage a wet, clicking sound. Blood and saliva bubbled from his lips. Rowan paused. He looked at the ruin he had made of the body. It was a thing of broken sticks and leaking sacs. But the chest still rose and fell in ragged, hiccupping spasms. The star-and-void eyes still stared, drowning in an ocean of suffering. It was not enough. The vessel was broken, but the tenant remained. Rowan had been deliberately avoiding shattering the Origin of Chaos because that would end his suffering prematurely. Rowan dropped the hammer. It landed on the rock with a final, definitive clunk. He placed his hands on the pale man’s chest, ignoring the way the broken ribs shifted sickeningly under his grip. He ignored the blood that slicked his gauntlets. He focused on the grey stain, the mark of Anathema’s first bite, which now covered the entire sternum. The pale man’s eyes focused on him. There was a question in them. A hope for an end. Rowan’s hands began to glow with a cold, grey light. He was not using the hammer anymore. He was using his Will. He was using the power of multiple Origins, all focused on his essence as a Reality who had the power to seize the Origins of Primordials. His hand rested on the chest of Eldrithor for a brief moment before he pushed. His hands sank into the pale man’s chest. There was no resistance from the shattered bone and torn muscle. They parted like water. But beneath that, there was a core of resistance—a knot of screaming, maddened energy, the compressed, terrified essence of Primordial Chaos itself. Rowan’s hands closed around it. The pale man’s body went rigid. A sound emerged from him that was not a sound at all, but a tear in the fabric of silence itself. It was the scream of a universe being born and dying in the same instant. Rowan pulled. Slowly, with immense, grinding force, he began to draw out the Origin of Chaos. It was not a physical organ. It was a thing of light and shadow and screaming probability, a miniature storm of everything the Primordial had been. It fought him. It lashed out with tendrils of raw chance, trying to rewrite the moment, to create a reality where this was not happening. But Rowan’s will was a vice. He was anchored in certainty. There was no maybe. The pale man’s body began to deflate, to desiccate. The vibrant red blood turned black and evaporated. The skin stretched tight over the pulverized skeleton, becoming parchment, then dust. The star-and-void eyes clouded over, the light in them dying as the source of that light was physically dragged from its shell. But the process was slow. Agonizingly slow. The essence did not want to come out. It was rooted in the concept of existence itself. Rowan was not just pulling out a soul; he was pulling out a fundamental law of the cosmos. The pale man’s form was still conscious, still feeling. He felt his own infinity being drawn out through the hole in his chest. He felt himself being turned inside out. It was a violation beyond the physical breaking. It was the unmaking of his "I." His jaw, unhinged and broken, managed one final, silent word shaped by a breath of dust. "...please..." Rowan gave a final, mighty heave. With a sound like the root of reality being torn from the ground, the core of Primordial Chaos came free. The pale man’s body instantly collapsed into a fine, grey ash, identical to the dust of the shore. The empty husk was gone, having merged with the surrounding nothingness. In Rowan’s hands, the essence of Chaos writhed and screamed, a captured star going supernova. It was a beautiful, terrifying thing—a knot of infinite potential trying to exist in a realm that forbade it. Rowan looked at it for a long moment, this thing that had caused so much pain, so much random suffering, across all of time. He felt no triumph—only a cold, immense weight. He opened up a path to his Origin Land and threw the Origin of Chaos into it. The Origin flew, a dying star on a final trajectory, across the grey waste of Oblivion into his realm. And it was gone. Not with a bang, or a whimper. With nothing. Rowan stood alone by the altar, the black hammer at his feet. The only sound was the silent hum of the ever-hungry altar that was rapidly gaining an appetite for the screams of Primordials. Turning around, Rowan vanished; there was still more work to be done.