The Primordial Record

The frozen tundra gave way to a landscape of jagged, black glass mountains that reflected the chaotic sky in distorted, nightmare shades.

They had somehow crossed from the previous dimension into another, and Lyra noticed that the two powerful beings walking with them had been startled before they slowly settled. It would seem that this situation, while unexpected, was not an unknown possibility.

"Reality is changing, the Primordial Essence flooding into it is causing countless havoc across space and time," Fury muttered, but his voice was loud enough to reach everyone.

The air itself felt sharp here, and the Echo the Elythrii could sense from the distant Arena was no longer a distant thrum but a constant, oppressive pressure that made the Elythrii's ears ring and their heads ache.

Only Fury seemed unaffected, whistling a tuneless, crackling melody that popped and hissed like a dying fire, but the Elythrii noticed that the phoenixes surrounding his body were dying faster than usual.

Vraegar moved with a new wariness, his colossal head weaving slowly from side to side, scanning the razor-sharp peaks.

"The Shattered Mirror, a place where a wormhole that once spewed Primordial Essence resided. I believed it must have been destroyed by one of the Primordial powers," he intoned, his voice lower, more cautious. "Reality is thin here. Reflections can become real. Thoughts can take shape. Guard your minds, little saplings. Do not give form to your fears. Mortal beings like you usually have many."

"Oh, lighten up, Frost-Scale," Fury said, kicking a shard of obsidian that skittered away and multiplied into a dozen identical shards before clattering to a stop. "It's just a bit of existential feedback. It's fun! Look," he said, stopping and staring intently at his own warped reflection in a tall pane of black glass. His reflection stared back, but its hair was a crown of roaring, furious flames, and its eyes were pits of molten rock. "See? I'm thinking about how handsome I am. And there I am! Handsome."

"You are thinking of your own vanity," Vraegar corrected, a plume of frosty mist escaping his nostrils and freezing a patch of the glassy ground. "A concept so potent it requires no thinning of reality to manifest."

Fury stuck his tongue out at his reflection, which responded by baring fangs of solidified lava. He chuckled and moved on.

Lyra kept her patrol tight, their formation close, yet one of the Elythrii, Aelen, was looking around, a growing mania in his eyes.

Aelen's knuckles were white on his weapon. "First Blade," he whispered, addressing Lyra, "I keep… seeing things. In the corners of my vision. Movements."

"They are not real, Aelen," Lyra said, her own voice strained. She had seen them too: flickers of dark, multi-limbed shapes skittering just at the edge of sight. "Do not give them your attention. Do not feed them."

It was easier said than done. The landscape played tricks on the mind. The whispering wind sounded like voices pleading in a forgotten tongue. The grinding of Vraegar's scales against the glassy rock sounded like bones breaking.

Elara, the young warrior, suddenly cried out and pointed. "There! A child! An Elythrii child!"

They all turned. Standing between two sharp pillars of glass was a small, translucent figure, its form wavering like a heat haze. It had the general shape of an Elythrii youngling, but its face was blank, featureless. It raised a hand, beckoning.

"It's a trick," Lyra said sharply, her glaive humming as she gripped it tighter.

"But it's so real…" Elara took a half-step forward.

"Do not!" Vraegar's command was like a physical force, freezing Elara in her tracks. "It is a Shard-Phantom. It feeds on longing and grief. It has pulled the image of a lost one from your mind, warrior. To touch it is to let it anchor itself to your soul, to drain your warmth until you are as cold and empty as this place."

The warning of Vraegar should have been enough, but somehow, Aelen had been able to squeeze through the barrier of the dragon's will, and he had touched a pillar of black glass. His eyes widened as a silent scream emerged from his open mouth before he turned into ash.

The party went silent, the Elythrii in shock at losing one of their members and the dragon at failing to contain a mortal being.

Before the shock could settle in the hearts of the Elythrii, the black glass rippled, and a phantom of the dead Aelen stepped out of it.

The phantom gestured, a call to join with him, and what horrified the Elythrii was the string pull for them to comply, and if not for the will of the dragon surrounding them, maybe all of them would have fallen to this phantom.

Elara stumbled back, her face pale. "My… my brother. I can hear his cries; he wants us to bring him back home. He is so cold." Tears welled in her multifaceted eyes and froze on her cheeks.

The phantom's blank face seemed to smile. It took a step forward.

Fury sighed dramatically. "Ugh, emotional vampires. So tacky." He snapped his fingers. There was no sound, but a wave of pure, dry heat shot out from him. The phantom didn't scream; it simply unraveled, its form dissipating like mist under a noon sun. The oppressive feeling lessened slightly.

"There," Fury said, brushing his hands together. "All better. See? Nothing a little controlled burn can't fix."

"A brute-force solution," Vraegar rumbled, though he didn't sound entirely disapproving. "You scorch the symptom but ignore the sickness of this place."

"The sickness is boredom," Fury retorted. "And my cure is efficiency. Now, who's hungry? All this existential dread works up an appetite." He reached into a pouch at his belt and pulled out what looked like a lump of raw, glowing coal. He took a bite, crunching down on it with apparent relish. Sparks flew from his lips.

The Elythrii stared, horrified, when they noticed the coal was the screaming souls of billions of unknown creatures.

"What?" he said with his mouth full. "It's a high-energy snack. Want some? You can't eat souls, but it will warm you up." He offered the glowing rock to Lyra.

"We… sustain ourselves on sunlight and purified water," she said, trying to keep the revulsion from her voice.

"Sunlight?" Fury laughed. "That's like trying to run a volcano on a candle. No wonder you're all so twiggy." Nevertheless, he waved a hand, and the air around the Elythrii grew noticeably warmer, as if they were standing in a perfect, gentle sunbeam. Their aching muscles relaxed, and the ringing in their ears subsided. It was an oddly kind gesture, wrapped in insult.

They traveled in silence for a time, the only sound the crunch-crunch-crunch of Fury working his way through his petrified snack.

"You mentioned countless races," Lyra ventured, eager to steer her own mind away from the phantom shapes. "Endless wars. Our people know of the Skaraggi hives near the Inheritance Ground and the Stone-Shaper clans of the deep earth residing in the free-dimensional belts. But your perspective… must be vast."

Fury swallowed the last of his coal. "Vast? You have no idea. It's a zoo out there. A loud, violent, endlessly fascinating zoo. Take the Skaraggi, for instance. You see a hive of chittering, expansionist insects. I see a beautifully efficient biomass conversion system. They're not evil; they're just hungry. And their queen has a fantastic singing voice, if you can get past the fact that it causes your brain to liquefy. Shame I had to kill her, she refused to join my crusade and still wished to make me a vassal."

Elara looked ill. "And the wars?"

"What about them?" Fury asked. "They're endless because the reasons are endless. Apart from the major event that is set to shape Reality, which has slowly brought everything to a halt, the Skaraggi fight for food. The Stone-Shapers fight for the best rocks—don't laugh, it's a serious business, a really good vein of narrative-quartz is worth more than your entire forest. The Aether-Whalers of the floating continents fight over clouds that contain the dreams of dead gods. The Pyroclastic Mandarins fight philosophical wars over the correct interpretation of a single line of poetry written in lava a million years ago. It's all nonsense."

"It is not nonsense," Vraegar countered. "It is identity. It is the expression of purpose. A being, a people, must define themselves against something. Often, that something is another being or people. Someone like you should know that, but it seems you have been away from family too long. Or is this so-called alliance of yours a plea for help? A search for something inside you that is missing. I believe that conflict is the whetstone upon which cultures sharpen themselves."

Fury ignored the jab at his present situation by Vragear as he shot back,

"And sometimes they just sharpened themselves into oblivion," Fury smiled, a haunted look in his eyes. He might have grown a lot due to his talents, but that had exposed him to the horrors of Reality too quickly, and not everyone's soul was made to adapt to horror. He continued speaking with a hint of venom in his voice, "The K'tharr Empire defined themselves so hard against everyone else that they invented a weapon that erased their own timeline from existence. Very sharp. Very dead. Poof." He made an explosive gesture with his fingers.

"You speak of such tragedies so lightly," Lyra said, aghast.

"Tragedy? Comedy?" Fury shrugged. "It's all material. This whole damned Reality is a story, First Blade. A very, very long and poorly edited one. Some chapters are bloody, some are romantic, and some are just a single page that says, 'And then they all died because of a misplaced decimal point in a ritual.' You have to learn to appreciate the whole messy ritual. If you get too hung up on one gory stitch, you'll miss the grand, ridiculous pattern."

"And what is the pattern, oh sage of the forge?" Vraegar asked, a hint of mockery in his voice.

"That there isn't one!" Fury said, spreading his arms wide. "That's the beauty of it! It's chaos! Glorious, unpredictable, explosive chaos! The creators try to impose a melody, the killers try to impose silence, but the real music is in the noise in between!"