The Primordial Record novel Chapter 1761

Chapter 1761: The Arena

The battle was the first of many as the new party journeyed closer to the Arena.

Thankfully, the opposition they met was not very powerful, since those who could resist the call of the Arena mainly were mindless or beings of pure instincts who knew better than to go to a place that stank of such great power.

Still, for the Elythrii, the journey through the Shattered Mirror and beyond was a descent into a waking dream of cosmic absurdity as they saw creatures of nightmares that haunted their waking moments and learned of the absurdity of life on such a grand scale that it shook them all to the core.

The arguments between Fury and Vraegar became a familiar soundtrack, their eternal debate a strangely comforting anchor in the increasingly unstable reality.

They crossed plains of whispering ash that formed faces which pleaded for stories, foraged for sustenance in groves of crystalline fruit that shattered into musical notes when eaten, and once had to navigate a river of liquid time, its currents pulling at their memories and their very ages, they had glimpsed another powerful dragon-like being inside the river of time who looked at Vraegar with a hint of challenge before sinking deeper into the river.

Through it all, the Echo from the Arena grew. It was no longer a sound, but a physical presence, a thickness in the air that made movement laborious and thought sluggish. It was the psychic weight of countless infinite beings focusing their entire attention on one another, a pressure that would have vaporized lesser creatures.

The Elythrii moved in a daze, their connection to their fellows stretched to a thread, a faint, dying hum in the back of their minds against the roaring static of the impending conflict.

Then, they passed through a final, shimmering curtain of distorted space—a membrane of reality stretched taut—and emerged.

And all thought, all breath, was stolen away.

They stood on a shore. But the shore was not of land or water. It was a beach of swirling, fractal dust, each grain a miniature galaxy spinning in impossible colors. And it lapped at the edges of an ocean of pure, chaotic potential—a seething, formless nebula of might-have-beens and never-weres. This was the periphery. The very edge of the arena.

And before them, spanning the infinite expanse, was the Arena where the fate of an Era would be decided.

It was not a structure. It was a wound. A titanic, ragged tear in the fabric of all creation, a scar left over from the first division of light from dark. Its "edges" were not stone or metal, but the frayed ends of dimensional planes, crackling with raw, unformed energy. Within its impossible vastness, geometries shifted and boiled, mountains of solidified sound rose and fell in waves of silent crescendo, and continents of mirror-bright obsidian floated in a non-sky of swirling elemental fury.

They had silently crossed into the Great Abyss, and they could hardly feel the call of this demonic place because the power of the Arena had overshadowed the Aura of the Great Abyss. Countless Primordial might had been poured into its creation, and it stood as one of the greatest achievements of this Reality, because looking back from the beginning of Reality to this moment, nothing like it has ever been created.

It was too big to comprehend. Looking at it directly caused the mind to flinch away, to see only fragments: a curve that was simultaneously a mile and a million miles across; a canyon that plunged through the heart of a star; a forest of trees made of frozen lightning.

"This..." Lyra breathed, her voice a tiny, insignificant thing swallowed by the immensity. "This is where they will fight?"

"Fight?" Fury snorted, though even his usual bravado was muted, his fiery hair flickering with something like reverence. "No, little sapling. They won’t ’fight’ here. They will do something that beyond battle. I like to think of it as a negotiation of the laws that would bind reality. This is the negotiating table. And those," he said, pointing a glowing finger towards the "seats" that rose in countless tiers around the impossible wound, "are the audience."

The Elythrii followed his gesture, and their perception, already reeling, shattered completely.

Verify captcha to read the contentVerify