The Primordial Record novel Chapter 2200

Chapter 2200: We Do Not Stop Until This Is Done

TEN THOUSAND ORIGIN REALMS

The ten thousand Origin Realms had been absorbed by the Origin Tree, but that did not mean they had been fully integrated with it.

For Eos, the ten thousand Origin Realms were like a sandbox where all the experiments he was undertaking with Origin were made.

The battlefield, where so many Primordials and defenders of the Realm had perished, had now gone still.

This was not the stillness of peace; the battle had not ended, even though it seemed to have a weird pause as if the world was holding its breath waiting for the other shoe to drop.

The remnants of the armies of the Ancient Primordials had stopped. The Soulwraiths stood frozen, their faceless forms turned toward the light of the Origin Tree that was rising on the horizon of this shattered Existence like a second dawn.

Eva stood among the dead and the dying and the barely living, and she felt the change moving through her like a tide coming in after an impossibly long retreat.

The fifth layer of her Origin was right there, at the edge of her fingertips, and it had been there since the light of Eos’s soul had touched her, and she had been holding it back, holding back the thing inside her that wanted to bloom, because she knew, with the certainty of a being who had been born to understand light, that the moment she let go...

She would not be who she had been. And she was terrified of that.

"You are afraid," said a voice beside her, and she turned to see Telmus, who had not cleaned his face of the tears that had tracked through the blood and ash of battle, and did not seem to care.

His blade was dark and notched. His eyes were tired and old and somehow, underneath all of that, completely unbroken. "I can always tell. Your light goes a little blue at the edges."

"I am not afraid," Eva said automatically.

Telmus looked at her.

"I am terrified," she corrected.

He nodded. "Good. Terrified means you understand what it costs. Afraid means you’re going to run."

He looked out at the Origin Tree on the horizon, its branches spreading across the shattering sky, its roots drinking deep from the bones of the old world. "He’s not done yet."

"I know."

"And neither are we."

Eva looked at him for a long moment. Then she looked down at her hands, at the light that was pooling there, trying to get out, trying to become what it needed to be.

"If I do this," she said quietly, "I won’t be the same."

"No," Telmus agreed. "You’ll be more. There is still not enough space for any of us to make this step at this time, and I think it is right that you are the first of the new Primordials to reach the fifth layer. Just know that I will be right behind you."

Eva looked at him, nodded, and closed her eyes.

And she let go.

The fifth layer of her Origin did not erupt; it bloomed. That was the only word for it. Something that had been a seed since the moment she was born, since the first light had touched the first world, since the first eye had opened and seen and understood that seeing was itself a kind of creation... that seed bloomed, and what grew from it was not power, not in any way she had previously understood that word.

THE ETERNAL TOWER

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