The Primordial Record

On the ledge, Fury let out a low whistle. "Well, well. What have we here? Something new under the suns. I didn't see that coming."

Vraegar was silent. The shock he was experiencing was apparent from his scales, which were shivering and emitting hissing noises. His massive head tilted. "Impossible. The Primordial spheres are fixed. They are the foundation. They cannot be added to."

"Looks like she didn't get the memo," Fury said, his eyes alight with fascination. "Imagination. Hah! No wonder she's new. It's the one force that can truly make something from nothing. The others just rearrange the pieces. She… invents new pieces."

Ghribba the Silver Queen shook her head; her eyes were wild, and the madness that had been carefully veiled had been fully revealed.

"No, this is an abomination. A paradox. The foundational forces are fixed. They are the axioms of existence. You cannot simply… invent a new one."

Fury laughed aloud, "In case you have missed the memo, the fucking proof is staring at you right in the face. You have seen glimpses of the Origin Land, Silver Queen. Did you believe that a place like that can exist inside a Reality like ours? Or have you deceived yourself into thinking that this place would be in a distant dimension? Open your eyes, all of you. There is more to existence than we know, and now we are seeing it in all its glory and horror."

It is insanity," Old Man Seed, who had long stopped hiding his Aura, countered the feverish excitement of Fury, his pale eyes tracking a flock of winged, singing teacups that flew past their bubble, pursued by a cloud of possessive silence. The arrival of Primordial Imagination had caused severe changes across Reality.

Although it was apparent that she was not overtly broadcasting her powers, it was inevitable that Reality would change with her presence. The light of the sun would touch all in its vicinity, even if the sun had no wish to do so.

Seed chuckled before he began to laugh aloud. He could see the face of his daughter, Elura, but he knew that she was gone. She controlled the Tree of Imagination, and he knew that one of her greatest ambitions was to find the source of her powers and push for a level beyond the Old Ones to become a Primordial.

It was always a foolish dream, but Seed did not have the heart to break the last of the light in her heart, but Reality was a bitch. Her dreams had been fulfilled, but she had not been the one to savor this victory; it was someone else… something else. At the end, they were all pawns, and Seed never knew his rage could burn this hot.

His laughter drew silence from the pathetic immortals around him, and he wished that he were drunk. Life had taken the last thing he held close and perverted its nature. He began speaking aloud, not caring if those around him understood,

"I have lived for a long time and know that Order and Entropy are the fundamental tensions. Creation and Destruction. Light and Darkness. Life and Death. They are the two hands that shape reality. This… this 'Imagination'… it is not a hand. It is a spasm. A random twitch. It has no place here. It has taken something tangible and made a mockery out of it."

"No place?" Fury whirled on him, his flames flaring. At first, he had been afraid of the Aura he was detecting from Seed, but after his system had been repeatedly shocked by the presence of the Primordials, he had grown numb. "Look around, you old man! It has every place! It's taking place! Your precious 'fundamental tensions' were about to grind each other into dust and take the rest of us with them! What? Did you think we were all fools who could not see the changes across Reality? These battles were never about us in the first place; we are simply bystanders, and those were our only choices. Imagination has no place here? I beg to differ. Now there's a third option. A wild card. And it feels better than any option that has been in front of us for a long time."

"A wild card is not a solution," Vraegar intoned. "It is merely a delay of the inevitable. I know you pursue disorder, Fury, in the face of the Primordials, you see your powerlessness, and every change you see among their rank makes you believe there might be a chance for something new, but have you forgotten the sort of beings that rule over us? In your heart, do you believe that this Primordial…" He gestured with his snout towards the chaos of power above, "would give you everything your black heart desires, or would it simply take, like their kind always do."

"Everything! And nothing!" Fury shot back, throwing his hands up. "That's the beauty of it! It's potential! It's the 'what if'! It's the spark in the dark that might become a sun or might just be a pretty flash! You're so busy thinking about the destructiveness of the flame, you forget why the flame is beautiful! It's beautiful because it changes! It consumes, it transforms, it dances! It doesn't just sit there, frozen in a block of ice for all eternity! Vraegar, I have given up all thoughts of victory. Now, I just want to watch it all burn. You, on the other hand, still believe that something orderly would arise from the ashes of this madness."

Their arguments suddenly stalled as they all sensed the profound change that had just transpired across Reality, even the Primordials above seemed to pause as a terrible hush fell across the Arena.

The fifth presence did not arrive. It was simply… recognized. It was as if it had always been there, watching, and had only now decided to allow itself to be perceived.

There was no fanfare, no sensory signature—only a dreadful, absolute inevitability. The blooming of Life was now seen in the context of its wilting. The perfect record of Memory was now seen in the context of its eventual dissolution. The tempting whispers of Demon were now seen in the context of their final, futile end. The beautiful dreams of Imagination were now seen as fleeting sparks in an infinite darkness.

Sands in an hourglass that had been turning since the first moment. A wheel that turned, grinding all things down to dust. It was patience. It was mercy. It was horror. It was Primordial Time.

But it was hidden. Unlike the others, it did not manifest a form or claim a seat. It was a perspective that settled over the arena, a lens of finality through which everything was now viewed.

The audience felt their own mortality, their own expiration date, as a sudden, cold certainty. Even the immortal felt it; for them, it was the certainty of eventual obsolescence, of being forgotten, of their energy one day being recycled into something new.

The Primordials were assembled. Life, Memory, Demon, Imagination, and the hidden presence of Time. The air crackled with their combined power, a silent conversation happening on a frequency too high for any lesser being to perceive. But on their ledge, the immortals here, ancient and powerful in their own right, could sense the edges of it. Their faces were grim.

"They're arguing," Seed muttered, his eyes closed in concentration. "Light, Soul, and Chaos are not present. I think… I think they might be scared."