The Primordial Record novel Chapter 2206

Chapter 2206: The Smile of A Predator (2)

However, this thought felt a bit like sacrilege in her mind. How could she doubt her lord? It must be this place. End had stripped too much from her, and until they left this place, she could not trust her judgment.

"I’m sorry," Circe said to Rowan, and her voice was very small. "I have been dreaming of you."

"I know," Rowan said.

"You do?"

"In the distant past, I believed I had been sending the dreams. Still, that was so long ago, I thought I had dreamt it. Thank you for confirming that it was not just a dream."

Circe went very still. "It is the least I could do. I brought the dreams to Eos, and many changes happened in Existence due to it. With this dream, I think the future became shaped by it, although I don’t know how Eos had used it."

Rowan tilted his head in his small, considering way.

"He used it the way it should. I know myself, and among all things, we are ruthless to our enemies, but that is nothing to our ruthlessness to our own selves," he said.

The words hung in the air of End like a note held too long.

Prime’s arms tightened fractionally around the child without his conscious decision. He felt, not for the first time in this valley, the low, cold pressure of something being slightly wrong that he did not yet have the framework to name.

The child had been alone for eternities and had kept himself alive by singing a single held note across geological time. There was no reason, no reason whatsoever, to feel what Prime was beginning to feel.

And yet.

"Let’s go home," Prime said, and his voice came out more carefully than he had intended. "There is someone waiting for you."

"Yes," Rowan said. "I can feel him."

"Are you ready?"

"I have been ready for a long time."

Prime adjusted the small body in his arms and turned back the way they had come.

Victorious Genesis, who had said almost nothing the entire journey, who had been enjoying the subtraction of his complications down to the simple fact of a man in this place, fell into step beside Prime.

His face was unreadable. His eyes, when Prime glanced at them, were on the child.

"Prime," Victorious Genesis said, sending his thoughts into his mind so that Rowan could not hear. "His shadow."

Prime did not immediately look. He kept walking, and he replied to Victorious Genesis also with his mind, "What about it?"

"Look at it. Don’t let him see you looking."

Prime waited a long, slow breath. Then, as if shifting Rowan’s weight in his arms, he let his eyes drop to the substrate beneath his feet, and he looked at the place where the child’s shadow should have been.

The shadow was there, and it was the correct size and shape, and it moved with the correct timing of a shadow of a child being carried.

But the edges of it were... wrong.

Not in a way that Prime could have pointed to, if he had been asked to describe it. The edges were edges. They were not frayed or bleeding or doing any of the visually legible things that wrong shadows did in stories.

They were simply... the only word Prime had for it was listening.

The edges of the shadow were listening, the way the edges of a predator were listening while the rest of its body held still.

VERIFYCAPTCHA_LABELVerify