Chapter 2203: The Song of Rowan (1)

Looking through the window into End, they all stepped back except for Prime, because he was the only one who had the power to pass through the window. Vraegar had already led them to it, and he had to open the road.

Prime condensed the power of time on his fingertips, and he touched the window, creating a red dot that spread out and melted the entire window, like a thin sheet of ice meeting flames.

It was a sort of dimensional movement that even he had trouble understanding, but what he was aware of was that something was removed from him as he passed.

It was not structured. It was not melodic. It was the sound of a voice that had been singing for so long that the song had become indistinguishable from the singer.

The landscape, if that was the word, was composed of things that had been.

A low, constant, almost-sound that made itself known in Prime’s bones before it made itself known in anything he would have called his senses.

Everyone saw something different, but Prime saw, as his eyes adjusted to the logic of the place, entire civilizations folded into strata beneath their feet, compressed histories, reduced now to something geological, and even more amazing, it could be walked across.

“We follow the music,” he said, “I have been hearing that music faintly through the window, and only he can make music like that… no one else can.”

Even though End had been twisted by the Great One, it was still a thing of rules, and to access its core, a certain price must be paid.

Vraegar began to walk.

Vraegar saw how easily Prime had made a doorway to this place, and he chuckled self-deprecatingly. Only he knew how much he had paid to open this window, and he had been ready to give up his life if he could just open a small crack, and if Prime had just waited a few million years before coming, he would have done this, hoping that his sacrifice would make the path easier for the next to follow.

He could recover due to his nature as a bloodline Avatar of Eos, but for others, it was not necessarily the case.

“How do we find him?” Circe asked.

“Keep moving,” Vraegar said quietly. “End does not attack. It does not need to. It simply wears down what you believe about yourself. The longer you stand still, the more of you it will take.”

He saw the shapes of cities that had loved their builders, flattened into the substrate. He saw Primordials reduced to patterns in the dust. He saw Realities collapsed into single grains of something that was not quite sand.

It was not music in any sense that Prime’s training or understanding of music had prepared him for.

The music Vraegar had mentioned suddenly appeared as they walked.

Vraegar crossed last, and Prime watched what End did to him.

Nothing in End was being actively destroyed, because the destruction had already happened. This was what came after. You could call it the long afterlife of destroyed things, the place where the ended went to continue being ended, indefinitely, forever.

And this forgetting was the slow, ordinary unmaking that was the true face of End before the Great One had sharpened it into a weapon.

They appeared like phantoms around Prime before they vanished, but they had ensured that the others following him would not pay the full price of what he had paid.

With the aid of Eos, Prime knew the true nature of End, and now he was seeing it here.

The dragon came through unchanged. Whatever End took from entrants, it had already taken from Vraegar even before he crossed.

She was not gone, but her light had been dimmed, in the way a flame dimmed when you moved it into a room with less air.

It was both beautiful and intensely horrifying.

In End, Victorious Genesis was just a man, and although it would scare any other Primordial, he seemed to be enjoying it, as he looked at his mortal body with glee.

He felt it go as he crossed, felt the fifth layer of his Origin, the bright, whole, newly-born Aeternitas that had been singing in his bones since the moment of her birth, go dim.

It was the sound that things made when they were in the process of ceasing. Not the dramatic sounds of destruction or the sharp sounds of death.

It was not a step from one place to another, even though that was what he had just done; instead, passing through the window was a subtraction.

Prime did not glance at the others, and he stepped through the way he had just opened, and this step turned out to be one of the strangest thresholds Prime had ever crossed.

What End took from Prime was certainty.

It was beautiful.

A long, uninterrupted note, held across geological time, bent and shaped by something that was not an instrument but a will.

This place was the quiet, patient sound of erosion and forgetting.

End was not dark. Darkness implied the absence of light, and absence implied the concept of presence, and End did not traffic in concepts that complex. What surrounded them as they walked was a frequency.
𝕗𝕣𝑒𝐞𝓌𝖊𝙗𝚗𝙤𝔳𝑒𝔩.𝐜𝗈𝘮

Prime looked around this place with curiosity in his eyes. A part of him had expected darkness, but he had been wrong about that, too.

“Yes,” Prime said. “It is. That is one of the things the Great One got wrong… or maybe right, if it serves their need.”

The new lifeform was still there. She was just quieter here, because here was a place that did not believe in completion.

It did nothing.

The other layers adjusted. Kronos drew closer to him, the weight of his armor suddenly reassuring in a way it had not needed to be in the Tower. Kairos gathered her robes. Aevum and Aeon moved to either side of him, flanking him not from protocol but from something much older and simpler.
𝓯𝑟𝕖𝗲𝒘ℯ𝗯𝔫𝗼𝖛𝚎𝗹.𝗰𝐨𝓂

However, this removal was not done with violence or malice, but with the inevitability of gravity. Something had to be removed, because what was on the other side could not accommodate the full weight of what he had been on this side.

“Everything that has ever been ended is still here,” Prime said, walking steadily, and making the others understand where they were walking through, knowing it would aid them in the understanding of their Origin. “That is what End is. It is the archive of cessation. Eos believed that the Great One made it this way because they wanted everywhere his broken children could not reach from to have a landfill. A place to put the previous Existences, so they would not haunt the next one.”

“It’s haunted anyway,” Fury said, and his voice was unusually quiet.

Fury, Circe, and Victorious Genesis crossed behind him, and Prime felt the moment each of them was lessened by the crossing. Fury’s phoenix light, which had been a constant high-frequency thrum in the space around him, went muted. Circe’s immortality, which Prime had always been able to sense as a faint shimmer of probability around her, contracted inward, and Victorious Genesis, whose nature Prime had never fully understood and who had always felt, to him, like a room with too many doors, simplified.

Prime understood, then, why it had taken Vraegar millions of Cosmic Eras to reach this place, which could also be seen as a price, because only the truly worthy would sacrifice everything for their goals, no matter how small they were.

It was also the saddest thing Prime had ever heard.