Chapter 1944: The Journey Through Limbo (1) Rowan, alongside the Archai, flew through the absolute void of Limbo, heading towards the Cradle of Enoch and the feeling of devastation that was rising out from it like smoke from an erupting volcano. There is no air, no light, no up or down, only the ninth-dimensional emptiness that exists between what was and what will never be again. To accelerate his progress, Rowan created wings that were a replica of Eos’s dimensional wings, and they spread out behind him, vast and silent, and with every beat, they carried him forward faster than any law that once governed speed. During his journey through Limbo, he had discovered a frightening truth... Limbo is not a place, and it never was, not after the Primordials had been unleashed upon it. It was now a ninth-dimensional interstice where everything that was ever murdered by Enoch’s hunger was dumped after the feast. It is the graveyard of graveyards, the silence that eats other silences, the color that comes after the last color has bled out. The Incarnation of Rowan reaching the ninth dimension inside Eosah’s Reality meant that he could now also share the sight of a Primordial even when he had not reached this level, and now he could see much more, and Rowan as a recommendation, sent a message to Eos to create many new Incarnation as possible to gp through everything they knew about existence, and use their new eyes to see the shape that it would show them. As for him, he was heading towards a place that was undoubtedly dangerous, but he could not help but gather all the information about Limbo as he moved through it. This was very important data that Eos would need. He saw that in Limbo, distance has nine axes, all of them broken, and even the dimension of time here was a Möbius scar that loops back on itself and bites its own throat, and yet, an overall Will governed the madness, and it imposed a fixed direction on this looping time! This should be impossible, but nothing was truly impossible at a certain height of power. However, as freaky as Limbo’s structure was, he could not hide his sight from its overall nature, and for a Creator like him, being here was one of the hardest things he had ever done. Limbo was arranged like a museum of atrocities with infinite corridors of glass, and because it was infinite, there was an endless array of atrocities for him to find. It was as if the Primordial plundered existence; they left a road of devastation for him to follow, one that tested the limit of his sanity. Rowan once thought the Primordials ate everything that they came across, and they did, but most times, they left the remains behind, as if they were displaying their horrifying conquests. If Limbo were a museum, then he was moving through its central aisle, and on every side, at distances that make Realities look like dust motes, the devastation spreads out in perfect, untouchable display. Eos had created four broad groups of Archai, each group was tasked with different functions, and because Rowan’s primary aim for entering Limbo was to gather information, the Archai that he took with him were the Watchers. The one way to tell which group an Archai fell under was the rune on their chest, and for the Watchers, their runes were ever-changing and nebulous, and could take the shape of almost anything under creation. Along the way, the Watchers did not forget the task that Eos had given to them at their birth, "YOU ARE THE EYE AND THE RECORD. THE PERFECT WITNESS. OBSERVE. RECORD. KNOW. YOUR GAZE SHALL FALL UPON THE WORK OF YOUR KINDRED. YOU SHALL NOTE THE STRENGTH OF THE ANCHOR, THE COMPLEXITY OF THE WEAVE, THE FURY OF THE STORM. YOU SHALL BE THE MEMORY OF THE SYSTEM. IN YOUR RECORDS LIES THE TRUTH OF FUNCTION AND DYSFUNCTION. DO NOT INTERFERE. DO NOT JUDGE. ONLY PERCEIVE. BE THE SILENT, ETERNAL ARCHIVE OF ALL THAT TRANSPIRES." However, Rowan discovered to his amusement that his Archai, although they followed the rules he had given them, recorded everything with a flair that made him smile and pushed back the devastation he was feeling inside his heart. They had passed what was once a string of a dozen realities, where every sentient species sang its own evolution into being. Now the singers are frozen mid-note, mouths stretched open to impossible widths, throats filled with crystallized sound that can never finish. Their song has become a solid thing, transforming into black glass spears jutting from every chest, pinning them to the void like insects on display. The spears still vibrate, trying to finish the note that began millions of Cosmic Eras ago. The vibration is the only movement in the entire tableau. The Archai had recorded all of this, but they called this region in Limbo, the Carcass of the Choir. They passed through countless scenes of devastation, each more memorable than the other, but there was one that struck Rowan, and even Eos came to acknowledge it, and for a moment, it almost distracted him from his destination. The Archai called this place the Realm of Shattered Hourglass, and of all the places they had come across, they deemed that this location, even though it had been destroyed, deserved to be called a Realm. Also, Rowan felt the name was rather lazy because this broken Reality had the shape of an hourglass. This Realm was a Reality that tried to stop time to save itself from the hunger of the Primordials. Across this Reality were entire universes like grains of sand, frozen mid-fall. Some universes have already hit the bottom and shattered into galaxy-sized shards of frozen moment. Others still hang suspended, their gods and immortals caught in the act of realizing the trick did not work. A child in one universe was forever reaching for a parent who is forever turning away. Their fingertips are separated by less than the width of an atom and by more than eternity. As Rowan’s shadow passed over this Reality, for one heartbeat, he thought that the eyes of a child in one random universe were tracking him, but when he looked back, it was not the case. He sighed. Limbo was messing with his mind. All of this event happened centuries ago, and at that time, Rowan had thought that a unique realm such as this would be rare across Limbo, but he was wrong, and he learned about the true potential of infinity in a very grim manner. He soon found the next place that his Archai deemed to be special enough to be called a Realm, and suspended like a diseased jewel, was the Realm the Archai called the Heart-Nebula. It is the corpse of a reality that believed love could outlast consumption, even those as terrifying as the Ancient Primordial’s. The Primordials must have been aware when they came to this Reality, because they tore out every heart that had ever loved anything and strung them together into a single, galaxy-sized organ that still tries to beat. The arteries were braided timelines, the valves were screaming mouths. Every pulse sends a wave of blood that is actually liquid memory, and those memories were of first kisses, of deathbeds, of the last time someone said "see you tomorrow" and meant it. The blood never reaches the next chamber. They simply fall upward into the void and freeze into red snow that drifts forever, and as Rowan flies through the snow, each flake that touches his skin burns with someone else’s final happiness. It was as if the journey through Limbo was a journey through the psyche of the Primordials and Enoch, and as much as Rowan wanted to close his eyes to the endless devastation and suffering, like the Archia with him, Rowan knew that he needed to witness everything... There must be a record of all the suffering that had been imposed upon existence, and there must be a reckoning; otherwise, he would never be able to rest in peace. Far below Rowan, if "below" still has meaning in a realm like this, the Archai called this place the Plain of Unmade Children, and this was among the few times that Rowan was not amused by their sense of naming. Countless silhouettes of children who were never born because their universes were eaten before conception drift across its surface. They had no faces, only the faint glow where faces should have been. They reach upward with hands that dissolve into smoke when they touch the memory of a sky. When Rowan’s shadow crossed them, they managed to form mouths long enough to ask a single question that had no sound, and so Rowan could not hear what these last vestiges of a once thriving Reality said, but he did not need to hear, when he could feel their pain that was engraved in every particle of their body. "Do not forget us."