The Primordial Record novel Chapter 2037

Chapter 2037: The Primordial of Resurrection

The silence that settled over the old house on Willow Creek Lane was not the peaceful quiet of a sleeping household that this house had known for a long time... this time the silence was complete, like the final note in a long symphony.

For seventy-three years, Fury Kuranes had been Elias. It was not a name he had chosen for himself, but it was given to him by the boy who was on the verge of death, and so Fury had taken the burden of his life and granted the boy the chance to resurrect himself in the future as a phoenix, a more than worthy enough exchange.

Fury had worn this body from that day henceforth with a diligence that bordered on sacred devotion, and decades had passed, and he was now an old man.

He sat in his worn, green armchair by the bay window, the morning sun painting lines of radiance across his rug. In his hands, he held a simple terracotta pot, the soil within it dry and cracked. It was all that remained of the orchid Althea, his wife had nurtured for a decade.

It was a stubborn, beautiful thing that had finally yielded, its last blossom falling a week after her funeral, two years past.

He ran a thumb along the pot’s rough rim, calloused from a lifetime of gentle work that he could have never imagined himself doing in the past. Gardening, carpentry, holding hands with his children...

His memories were not a grand thing, but they were incredibly precious to him. The weight of his daughter, Liana, as a sleeping infant against his chest. The scent of ozone and cut grass before a summer storm, and Althea pulling him onto the porch to watch the lightning, her laughter a counterpoint to the thunder.

He could still remember the focus in his grandson Leo’s eyes as, at age six, he explained the intricate social structure of his ant farm. The feel of Callie’s small, confident hands guiding his as she taught him how to properly prune the rose bushes she’d inherited from her grandmother. "See, Grandad? You don’t just cut. You ask the plant where it wants to go."

And Theo. Little Theo, with a laugh like bells and a heart too vast for his small body. Theo, who had buried his beloved, ancient dog under the oak tree last autumn and declared, with solemn, five-year-old wisdom, "Now he’s part of the tree, and the tree is part of the sky, so he’ll always be with me when I look up." Theo, whose light had been extinguished by a swift, meaningless fever just three days ago.

The house was a museum of their echoes. The crooked bookshelf he and Leo had built together was still slightly off-level. The splash of vibrant blue paint on the porch floorboards is a permanent testament to Leo’s brief, passionate artist phase. Callie’s botanical sketches, framed and hung in the hallway, each labeled in her meticulous script. Theo’s last drawing was a stick-figure family under a huge, smiling sun, with a dog floating happily in the corner of the sky.

Elias felt the edges of his being begin to shift. He had expected this change for a long time, but now that it was here, he found himself wishing that it would delay a little bit longer.

The love in his heart was not diminishing; if anything, it was intensifying, becoming so pure and so vast it could no longer be contained within the vessel of ’Elias.’ This love, this profound, aching witness to mortal beauty, was the final piece of the experience.

Fury had come here, to this quiet corner of a spinning rock, to understand something. Not power, he was born knowing power. Not creation, that was his native tongue, spoken by his brother. But limitation. Fragility. The precious, heartbreaking arc of a story that writes its own ending.

He thought of Althea’s last words, whispered with a ghost of her old smile, her hand cool in his: "My lovely, temporary man. You filled my forever."

When they opened, Fury allied this mortal vessel to expand.

VERIFYCAPTCHA_LABELVerify