The Primordial Record novel Chapter 1749

Chapter 1749: A Story Never To Be Told

The primordial entity, older than language, was quiet for a long time, but Telmus was patient; time was almost meaningless here. His patience was rewarded when the demon began to speak at last.

"I have watched the rise and fall of a billion billion lives," he said finally. "I have seen empires build glorious towers towards heavens they invented, and I have seen those towers crumble into dust. I have heard the prayers of the first thing that ever knew fear. From this vantage point, Destiny is not a path one walks. It is a story that is told. But you are both the storyteller and the character. The quality of the Destiny is not measured by its ending, for all endings are the same. It is measured by the beauty and the courage of the story that is woven from the raw, random, and often brutal material of existence."

Telmus did not know if this was truly the truth, but he felt a shift in the chains that bound him. They were not weaker, but they felt... different. Less like prison bars and more like the roots of an ancient tree, they held him to a spot that was now familiar, almost comfortable.

"You have consumed countless others," Telmus said. "What did you learn from them?"

"I learned that most stories are short, fearful, and repetitive," Xylos said. "They are written in the sand at the edge of the tide, frantic scribbles that are washed away almost as soon as they are made. They consent to my view because they look back at their lives and see only the fading marks in the sand. They see the inevitable tide. They never grasp that the act of writing itself was the point."

"And my story?" Telmus asked.

"Your story is written in deeper sand," Xylos admitted. There was no flattery in its tone, only a weary assessment. "The tide will take it, too, eventually. But it has taken longer to read. It has... complexities. Contradictions. A stubborn refusal to accept the obvious."

"And is that why you linger? To see how it ends?"

"No," the demon said, and its form began to shrink, condensing from a vast, cosmic serpent into something more like a man, shrouded in grey, its features indistinct. "I linger because for the first time in an eternity of consumption, I find myself not just consuming a story... but appreciating it. You are not my dinner, Telmus. You have become my interlocutor. My last and only companion. A Throne is a relatively new concept. Since the beginning of time, I had never imagined that there would be a moment when I could see my shadow reflected on mortal flesh."

The revelation was more shocking than any of the demon’s previous horrors. This wasn’t about hunger. It was about loneliness. Xylos, the embodiment of the void, the great meaning-devourer, was starved for meaning itself. It sought consent not to win, but to connect. To have someone, anyone, look into the abyss with it and not just scream, but nod in understanding.

"You are trapped too," Telmus breathed. "Aren’t you? You are bound to your nature, just as I am bound to mine. You must consume, you must dismantle, you must prove that nothing matters. It is the only language you know. But you long for something else."

The grey-shrouded figure nodded slowly. "The silence becomes... very loud, after a few eons, and the hunger never ends."

A new understanding settled over the obsidian prison. The warden and the inmate were the same. The demon and the warrior were mirrors. One sought to impose meaning on a chaotic universe, the other sought to erase it, and both were desperate for the other to confirm their view.

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