Chapter 1789: Beyond Origin The colossal fury of the Rowan’s speech still vibrated in the cosmic firmament, a tremor of pure intent aimed at the hearts of the five beings who had orchestrated his ruin. His focus was a singularity of vengeance, drawing all light and hope into its crushing grip. But for a single, fractured moment—a nanosecond stretched across a billion years by his own nature—the gaze of one of his targets flickered. It was Xyris, the Silent, Primordial Time. Unlike the other Primordials who were filled with rage and fear, Xyris gaze could not leave his left arm that was painted with the blood of Primordial Soul. In his eyes was a profound, ancient weariness, a sorrow so deep it was less an emotion and more a fundamental law of a broken universe. It was not fear of the impending battle. It was the echo of an older, deeper cataclysm, a regret that predated this specific hatred. Rowan saw weakness, and in that flicker, he pierced through the Origin of Time with his consciousness. He could feel the defenses of Primordial Time rising up to shatter the probe of his consciousness, but it was already too late. Before now, Rowan already had a sizable stake inside the Origin of Time but he had kept his hand silent, but now, he erupted with all the brilliance of a supernova and tore a core Truth from the consciousness of Primordial Time. Doing this was sacrificing his position inside the Origin of Time, but Rowan believed it was worth it, he saw no need to hide who he was any longer. All of this happened in the barest fraction of a moment, and the roar of rage arose from Primordial Time from the intense violation of Rowan’s consciousness probing into the core of his being, but it was too late, Rowan had already gotten what he wanted. The roar of Primordial Time ceased as if Rowan had squeezed his throat, but the violation went beyond such physical constraints. The sorrow of Primordial Time was a window for Rowan, and he did not hold back. In an instant Rowan was in full control of the Origin of Time, and he squeezed, causing a shockwave of Time’s Origin to erupt throughout Reality, linking to all the Wills of Time that had been spread all of it by the shattered body of Primordial Time. All of Reality, even the Primordials were frozen in place. They could not have expected that Rowan was able to reach into the Origin of Primordial Time to attack them. Rowan had seen the memories of the past. He had seen how the body of Time was shattered and his Origin suppressed. With the small window of opportunity before him, a consummate warrior and killer like Rowan would take advantage of it. "I told you all to prepare, but the eons of your ceaseless consumption have made you all weak. You have forgotten what it means to battle for your life." The Primordials would be able to break from this prison of time in a short period, barely the blink of an eye, but for Rowan, this gave him all the time in the world to attack. Primordial Time was frozen in shock, he watched Rowan charged towards them, and he could not stop it, not quickly enough. To add insult to injury, he could feel the consciousness of Rowan dragging him into his memories, to one of the most painful events of his life, and his roar of indignation was covered by the pull of the past. The present, with its roaring promises of retribution, dissolved. The seething energy around Rowan’s form stilled. His terrible figure charging towards them blurred into faint outlines, like mountains seen through a dense, temporal fog. Primordial Time was pulled down, not into unconsciousness, but into memory. It was a ocean he had sworn never to swim in again, for its waters were made of lost joys and the acid of betrayal. Yet, he was drowning in it now. The scent of the present—ozone and void-dust and spilled divinity—was replaced by the aroma of dying stars and the quiet, breathless potential that exists only at the end of all things. The roar of his own power became a profound, echoing silence and he was there again. At the edge. ’No, not here... Rowan stop this... Ahhh... Stop it!!!!" ® They stood on the cliff of solidified void, Soul and Time. Behind them, stretching into an infinity that was finally, blessedly finite, was the carrion-carcass of a reality, Eosah. It was a glorious, terrible corpse. Dimensions, like spilled diamonds on black velvet, were darkening, her stellar hearts cooling into frigid iron. The last songs of a trillion, trillion nascent vitalities were fading into a permanent, featureless hum—the background radiation of a closed book. This was their purpose, their rhythm, as natural as breathing for mortals. They had killed many Realities like this, yet Eosah had not been killed easily. For a long time the Primordials had starved, and when they gained access to the heart of Eosah, they had luxuriated in her screams. Now her body was cooling, the life fading from her as they sucked out her marrow. They had chosen to witness this passing not in their vast, terrifying primordial forms—the forms that could encompass the corpse-reality and still have space left over—but as mortals. It was a habit, a game, a comfort. To experience the infinite through the limiting, exquisite lens of the finite. He was a man, tall and seemingly carved from old, weathered stone. His hair was the color of a twilight sky, and if one looked too closely, they might see the faint, slow dance of galaxies within its depths. His eyes were not a color a mortal could name; they were the deep, patient brown of rich soil that holds the fossils of eons, yet they flickered with the impossible, rapid-fire silver of quantum foam. He wore simple, dark clothes that seemed to drink the faint light, and his hands, resting at his sides, were strong and capable, the hands of a clockmaker or a gravedigger. This was Time, condensed. Not the river itself, but the bank from which one could watch it flow. She was a woman, and to call her beautiful was to call a supernova bright—a pathetic understatement that missed the entire point. Her hair was a cascade of living nebula, strands of violet, cobalt, and magenta that swirled with their own inner light, capturing the very essence of creation’s artistry. Her eyes were the true marvel. They were the color of a perfect event horizon, not the destructive kind, but the moment of ultimate potential where all things are possible, where light itself pauses to consider its options. They held a soft, terrible gravity, pulling not matter, but meaning, toward them. She was dressed in robes that seemed woven from the echoes of forgotten melodies and the remembered warmth of a first embrace. This was Soul, given a shape one could look upon without going mad. The song of existence given a single, perfect voice. She was his sister. Not by the crude biology of lesser beings, but by essence. In the first moments after the First Word was spoken, they had coalesced together from the echoing silence. Where there was Time, there was experience. Where there was experience, there was meaning. Where there was meaning, there was Soul. They were the unshakeable duality, the two pillars upon which all subsequent existence was hung. For eternities beyond counting, they had been a constant. He was the rhythm, the meter, the unyielding forward march. She was the melody, the harmony, the dissonance and resolution. One was meaningless without the other. Before them, in the cradle of the newly vacated reality, a light was kindling. It was not a star or a galaxy. It was a living, breathing Reality taking its first gasp. A baby. They had watched these births before, countless times. But this one was different. They had both felt it the moment the last reality breathed its last. A peculiar resonance. A new chord in the song. His name should have rippled across Limbo, but inside the corpse of his mother, it was hidden, but they heard it, Eos. Dawn. "He is beautiful, brother," Soul whispered. Her voice was not a sound that traveled through air, but a vibration that traveled through the substrate of existence itself. Time did not answer immediately. He was watching not just the baby, but his sister watching the baby. He saw the fierce, possessive, awestruck love in her gaze. It was a look he knew well. It was the look she gave every new beginning, every fresh potential. But this was more intense, more... focused. It was the look of a composer who has just heard the perfect, elusive note that will complete a lifetime’s masterpiece. "He is," he finally replied, his own voice a low, steady hum, the sound of continental plates shifting, of forests growing and dying, of sand falling through a cosmic hourglass. "A new song for you to learn. A complex one, by the feel of him." Eos pulsed gently, and in that pulse, new, strange laws of physics flickered into being and died away. Geometries that would drive immortal mathematicians insane blossomed like flowers made of light and folded space. "It is more than that," she said, and her hand found his. Her touch was an anchor in the relentless, often lonely, flow of him. To everything else, he was the current that carried them along. To her, he was the riverbank. She could stand with him, outside the flow, and simply observe. Her touch was warmth and understanding and a shared history so long that words like ’always’ and ’forever’ felt childish and brief. "He is the key," Soul breathed, her voice trembling with a fervor he had never heard before. "Can you not feel it, brother? Truly feel it? His structure... it is not like the others. He is not born from the silence that follows the end like the others. He is born from the echo of the First Silence. The one that existed before the First Word. He is woven from a thread that precedes us." He did feel it. A resonance that made his own eternal substance hum with an unfamiliar, almost painful frequency. It was a vibration that suggested a layer of existence so fundamental, so prior to all concepts of beginning and end, cause and effect, that to perceive it directly was to unravel. It was the final, ultimate mystery. The one even they, the first children of existence, the Primordials who had ruled over all realities since the beginning of time, could not grasp. They were lords of all that was, but this was the shadow of what was before there was a was. It was called, in their oldest, most secret thoughts, the Layer Beyond Origin. Origin was their starting point. This was the source of the starting point. The author of the first page. To know it was the only ambition left to beings who had seen everything else. "Some doors are not meant to be opened, sister," he said, though his own ancient curiosity, a force as powerful as gravity, was stirring. He could feel the temptation to know, to finally understand. "We are the guardians of what is, the shepherds of what will be. Not the conquerors of what lies before. That path is not for us." She turned to him then, and her mortal face was etched with a desperate, glorious ambition. The love in her eyes was now mixed with a feverish light that was almost frightening. "Guardians? Shepherds?" The words were gentle, but held a scalpel’s edge. "We are more than wardens, brother, that title we have disregarded. We are the potential for more! For all our power, we are bound. Bound by the very laws we embody. You are Time. You cannot stop. You cannot go backward. You cannot truly see the future, only its infinite branches. I am Soul. I am the sum of all experience, but I cannot create a new type of experience from nothing. We are curators of a museum whose walls we cannot breach." She gestured to the sleeping Eos, whose dreams were birthing entirely new colors and emotions in the space around her. "But he... he is different. He is a crack in the wall. A window. He is a bridge." He felt a coldness then, a chill in the relentless flow that was his blood. It was the cold of absolute zero, the cold of a truth he did not want to hear. "What are you saying?" Her gaze was unbearably soft and unbearably cruel. It was the look of a mother explaining a necessary hurt to a child. She squeezed his hand, her grip tight, almost pleading. "We have tried everything, you and I. We have consumed energies from the hearts of dying dimensions. We have unspooled paradoxes to see their core. We have existed in every state of being conceivable. We cannot comprehend the Layer Beyond Origin because we are of the system that came after. We are products of it. We need a lens of something... purer. Something that touches both sides. A catalyst." She took a breath, and the dying Reality seemed to hold its breath with her. "Your body, brother. Your essence. You are the great river that connects all moments. You are the only constant, the one thread that runs through every reality, every existence. You are the anchor of the ’after.’ If your flow were to be... suspended... at the moment of its greatest tension... if it were crystallized, focused into a single, impossible point..." She looked from him to Eos, her eyes blazing with the terrifying light of revelation. "...and that point was fired through the lens of Eos’s nascent, unformed heart, which touches the ’before’... I could use that conduit. I could ride that beam of solidified Time into the heart of what was before Origin. I could see it. I could know. I could understand the source of all sources. We could finally become whole. Not two halves of a duality, but a complete, unified understanding." The plan unfolded in his mind, not as words, but as a vision. Horrific. Brilliant. Inevitable. She would not just kill him. That would be too simple. Death was a temporary state for their kind. She would sacrifice him. She would sacrifice the very concept of Time itself. She would turn his eternal, flowing nature into a frozen, jagged spear. She would use his corpse, the husk of the greatest constant in existence, as a metaphysical bridge, a harpoon thrown into the heart of the ultimate unknown, and she would use Eos, this innocent, newborn reality, as the firing mechanism. It was an act of such profound violation it made the death of realities seem gentle and natural. The bitterness that flooded his mouth was a poison more potent than any that could be distilled from dead stars. It was the taste of ultimate betrayal wrapped in the language of ultimate love. "You would unmake me?" The words were flat, stones dropped into a bottomless well. "Not just my form, but my function? You would stop Time itself for a theory? For a... a glimpse?" "For the ultimate truth!" she insisted, her voice rising into a symphony of passion and desperation. "Don’t you see? It is the only thing left worth doing! We who have seen the birth and death of countless realities, who have heard the songs of gods and the silence of the void... we are bored, brother. We are stagnant. We are circling a drain of our own magnificence. This is our evolution. Our destiny. Our only possible ascension."