Chapter 1787: Rowan Eva’s presence called attention like nothing else, and it was because she held the power of a Primordial while still holding the warmth of a mother’s embrace. It was like a mortal looking directly into the sun and still not fearing it would hurt their eyes. "You are gathered here," her voice rang out, amplified by Algorth’s ancient power, "because you are confused, but you should not. Centuries ago, you saw the changes across Reality, and you heard my voice about the dawn of a new age. You have all seen a division in the fundamental nature of things. You wonder which path is true. Which light is real?" She looked directly at the faction of the Old Light, at the Celestial Creators and their Angels who still followed the path of Primordial Light despite the changes they had all felt in their dominion. She spoke to them, but her words carried to all, "My father offered you a cold, hard truth. And there is a place for that truth. But he offered it without purpose. Without love. Without growth. He offered you a perfect, eternal engine that goes nowhere." She spread her arms, encompassing the entire congress. "Everyone here has suffered the same fate! Your path ahead had been severed, your destiny halted. Every Old One has seen the glimpse of true power, and they know what has been given to them is far from their true Destiny. Now, I offer you a journey! I offer you meaning! I offer you a light that does not just reveal what is, but helps create what could be! But I see that some of you remain... unconvinced. You cling to the sterile past out of fear of the living future. So be it. I will not waste my light trying to illuminate eyes that refuse to see. This Reality is on its last age, and its killers are being worshiped as kings... no more will this be allowed to stand. I will show you the foundation for change." What she was speaking of was madness, but her power compelled all to listen. Even the Primordials were not stopping her words from flowing, and the New Light did not flinch under the weight of their regard. Eva’s tone changed, dropping into a register of terrifying solemnity. "Instead, I will show you the foundation upon which all truths, all lights, all possibilities ultimately rest. I will show you the weight of reality." She raised her hands high above her head. The light around her intensified, not spreading out, but shooting upwards in a single, coherent beam of immense power. It struck the very top of Algorth’s highest spire. The Living Castle shuddered. Its stone flanks groaned. The molten silver in its windows bubbled and boiled over. The spire began to glow, its substance becoming translucent, then transparent, then vanishing altogether, transforming into a lens, a gateway, a focusing apparatus of unimaginable scale and complexity. Eva was not summoning a being. She was using Algorth as a metaphysical amplifier, a divine trebuchet, to launch a call across the multi-layered membranes of existence, into the deepest, most silent voids between the voids. The beam from her hands was a message. A name. A title. An invitation. A single, echoing syllable that was felt more than heard: "ROWAN." ® The effect of this call was instantaneous. The Arena, which had withstood the sort of power that could end all creation inside this Reality, trembled. The plain of solidified light developed a hairline fracture that shot from one horizon to the other. On a billion billion worlds across every dimension, every pendulum stopped dead in its swing. Every star in every universe—the red giants, the white dwarfs, the yellow suns, the nascent protostars—flickered. Just once. As if something had walked over their grave. A silence deeper than any silence fell upon the Arena. The kind of silence that is not an absence of sound, but the presence of something that consumes sound. The hum of Algorth was gone. The whispered thoughts of the immortals were silenced. Even the internal hum of their own power seemed muted, stifled. Then, a pressure. It began as a feeling of profound density, as if the very air was turning to lead. Then it was the feeling of being at the bottom of a cosmic ocean, with the weight of all its water pressing down. Then it was more. The entire audience, countless billions of immortals whose powers had shaken creation, were pressed to the ground, their thoughts squeezed nearly to nothing, and only the awareness that this pressure was not focused on them kept them alive and sane. The Primordials themselves took a step back. A collective, unheard gasp. They weren’t just feeling the pressure. Reality itself was being compressed. The infinite Arena seemed to be shrinking, its vastness bowing inward around a single, specific point before Algorth. It was as if the gravity that this presence carried was so great that everything had to bow before it. Space twisted. Time stuttered. The laws of physics, which were merely the jokes Primordials told each other, began to weep and break. And then, He arrived. It was not an entrance. It was an imposition. There was no flash, no portal, no fanfare. One moment, there was nothing. The next, there was Him. He did not step into reality; reality was forced to accommodate Him, and it strained to the breaking point to do so. Rowan, the Apex Omniversal Titan... The Killer of Primordials. At his arrival, the death cries of two Primordials followed him as his shroud, and everyone here could intrinsically sense this change... eternity has been killed, and its executioner has arrived. He was... size had no meaning. To mortal eyes, he would have been a man, tall, impossibly muscular, carved from something darker than obsidian and harder than neutronium. His hair was a wild mane of frozen red flame. His eyes... his eyes were not eyes. They were the aftermath of the final, dying sigh of a universe, the absolute absence of everything, including hope. But to the beings gathered in the Arena, he was more. He was the walking embodiment of Finality. He was the concept that every story, no matter how epic, must end. That every song, no matter how beautiful, must fade. That every power, no matter how primordial, had a limit. And he was that limit. His mere presence was an act of violence against the ongoingness of existence. He stood on the plain, and the solidified light cracked and blackened beneath his feet in a web that spread for light-years. He did not look at the gathered pantheon. He did not need to. His attention was a physical force, and he was not yet bestowing it. He turned his head, slowly, the movement causing spatial anomalies to bloom and die in the air around him. He looked at Eva. A voice spoke. It was not a sound. It was the feeling of a glacier calving, of a continent sliding into the sea, of a star collapsing in on itself. "You Called." Eva, the New Light, who had faced down the presence of multiple Primordials, felt her very essence cower before this presence. But she did not flinch. She lowered her hands, the beam of light fading. She met the twin voids of his gaze. "I did," she said, her voice small but clear in the all-consuming silence. "A choice must be made between stagnation and growth. Between cold truth and living meaning. They," she gestured to the paralyzed congress of immortals, "will not choose, not because they don’t want to, but because the capacity for change has been denied to them. So I have called you to show them who holds the leash over all of reality, and the consequences of their decision. To show them the power that underwrites all powers." Rowan’s head turned again, with that same world-shattering slowness. His void-eyes swept across the gathered might of creation. He looked at the gathered Primordials. The two powers regarded each other as a communication that transcended words passed between them. They, more than anyone, could perceive the fall of Primordial Chaos and Primordial Soul, and this knowledge chilled them to the core. Because it represented many things they could no longer deny, Rowan did not just have the power to kill them; he was also influencing the outcome of his decision to affect their central bodies outside Reality. The fall of any Primordial inside Reality should have led to the collapse of Reality as soon as their main body detected the death of their avatars. A frightening possibility was beginning to take shape in their consciousness when... Rowan took a single step forward. It was not a large step. But it was the most significant action taken in all of existence since its beginning, and a shockwave erupted from around his impossible form. The shockwave was not of sound or force. It was a wave of acknowledgment. It was the universe itself being forced to recognize its master. In that single step, every star in every universe, across all dimensions, blinked out. Not flickered. Went dark. For one absolute, terrifying heartbeat, all of creation was plunged into a blackness so complete it was like a rehearsal for its own death. In that heartbeat, every living being, from the lowest microbe to the highest Celestial, felt a cold hand clutch its heart. They felt the utter fragility of their own existence. They understood, in a way that bypassed all thought, that they were allowed to exist only on sufferance. Then, as Rowan’s foot settled on the cracked light of the Arena, the stars re-ignited.