The Primordial Record

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.

The galleries of the arena were not built; they were manifested. Entire worlds had been folded into bleachers. A range of mountains, each peak carved into a throne for a giant of living stone. A swirling vortex of captured suns, each a resting place for a being of pure plasma.

A web of shadow strung between the peaks, upon which nightmares perched like ghastly birds. A forest of singing crystal, each tree holding a choir of light-beings. A swamp of bubbling primordial ooze was where vast, shapeless things undulated.

And the beings. The countless races. The numbers were beyond counting, beyond meaning. They were not an army or a crowd; they were a demographic sample of all existence, a census of all dimensions.

Lyra's enhanced eyesight meant to spot a leaf falling a hundred miles away in her own forest, but she could not process it. She saw glimpses, fragments of the whole, each one a new lesson in terror and wonder.

The only races she could recognize with a degree of certainty were the Skaraggi, a living carpet of chitin and clicking mandibles covering an entire continental plate of a folded-in world, their collective mind-hive a palpable pressure of single-minded hunger.

She saw the Stone-Shaper clans, not as the small, earthy folk of legend, but as majestic, mountain-sized entities of granite and gemstone, their slow, tectonic thoughts causing the very air around their section to vibrate with deep, patient power.

She saw things with a million eyes and wings of vacuum. She saw entities that were living mathematical equations, their forms constantly resolving and dissolving. She saw gods from forgotten pantheons, now reduced to minor spectators. She saw demons from the most bottomless pits, chained to their seats by bonds of crackling energy, roaring their defiance into the silent thunder of the arena.

The air was thick with the power they all radiated. It was a storm of auras, a hurricane of conflicting domains. The scent of ozone was buried under the smell of blood, incense, ozone, rot, nectar, and the cold void of space. The sound was a roar of silent languages, psychic broadcasts, chants, war-songs, and the grinding of celestial mechanics.

The Elythrii fell to their knees, not in worship but in sheer sensory overload. Their hands clamped over their eyes and ears as one of them gasped, "The song... it's all wrong... It's every song at once... it's noise..."

Elara was weeping openly, tears of awe and terror freezing and evaporating on her cheeks simultaneously in the chaotic energy field. "So many... how can there be so many? Our entire people... we are less than a grain of sand on this beach."

Vraegar surveyed the scene, his glacial eyes reflecting the pandemonium. "This is but a fraction," he rumbled, his voice a small island of calm in the maelstrom. "Many are still arriving. Many more are watching from afar, through scrying pools and reality-shards. This event will define epochs. All who can, bear witness."

Fury cracked his neck, the sound like splitting rock. "Alright. Time to find our seats. The good spots are probably taken, but I know a few tucked-away ledges with a decent view of the impending catastrophe." He began striding forward along the galactic beach, as if navigating a market square.

"Seats?" Lyra asked, her legs feeling like water. "Where... how... could we possibly..."

"Don't worry about the 'where'," Fury called back. "Worry about the 'how not to get eaten on the way'. Stick close. Frost-Scale, you're on crowd control. Your particular brand of monotonous stillness is great for clearing a path."

Indeed, as Vraegar moved forward, his aura of absolute zero preceding him, the seething mass of entities subtly recoiled. A path opened through a group of fiery salamander-beings who hissed and sputtered as their flames guttered in his presence. A hovering, eye-covered sphere veered sharply away, its many pupils dilating in discomfort. They were insignificant to these powers, but Vraegar's ancient, potent presence was an annoyance they would rather avoid.

The journey through the "concourse" of the arena was a nightmare of scale and strangeness. They walked past arguments between gods that shook the fabric of space. They saw markets where concepts and emotions were traded like spices. They had to step over the sleeping form of a giant whose beard was a flowing river of stars and whose snoring created small supernovae in his nostrils.

Lyra felt a profound, soul-crushing insignificance. She was a mayfly at a conference of continents. Her people's wars, their history, their cherished home—it was all a tiny, fleeting pattern in an infinite web.

The idea that their creator, the benevolent Singer of Suns, was one of the two beings about to clash here seemed ludicrous, arrogant. What concern would such a being have for a single, small garden in a corner of one universe?