recovered through a mnemonic crystal — corruption level: severe
partial playback — missing segments cannot be restored
The sky was—
—there was no sky. There was only him. There was only him, and the sky had ceased to exist as a separate concept because he was greater than the concept, greater than the word, greater than the space the word occupied within the mind.
We knew they existed. Of course we did.
We studied them. Catalogued them. Mapped their territories onto charts locked away in archives no non-elf had ever touched. We believed that understanding something was the same as containing it.
[gap — estimated: forty-two seconds of memory lost]
—the ground was gone. I mean that literally. The ground had been removed. Not destroyed. Removed, as one brushes aside a minor obstacle with the back of a hand. Aerindal was shouting something to my left, but I couldn’t hear him because the sound the Primordial made simply by breathing was louder than anything I had ever understood as sound. It wasn’t noise. It was pressure. It was the air being informed that it needed to behave differently.
We looked at the illustrations in the ancient treatises and thought: exaggerated.
[gap]
—he wasn’t even looking at us.
That is what I need you to understand, whoever you are reading this, whoever survived long enough to find this crystal. He wasn’t looking at us. We were the equivalent of dust stirred into the air as he moved. We were displaced air. And even so—even without intention, without granting us so much as the acknowledgment of being a threat—
—twelve of us were already dead.
[gap — estimated: several minutes — distortion level: critical]
—the Council was wrong. I said so before we departed, and I was silenced with the gentle condescension the elders reserve for those who have yet to learn when to keep quiet. Kill them, they said. Control them, they said. Their rage destabilizes the fabric of the world, they said, as though they were the problem rather than our presence here—our peculiar arrogance in believing there was anything in this plane that we could control if only we took enough steps in the right direction.
A Primordial Dragon is not a creature.
I understand that now. I should have understood it sooner, but we elves have always had a complicated relationship with anything we cannot categorize.
A Primordial Dragon is a condition. A state of the world. It is what happens when mana exists for long enough, grows dense enough, ancient enough, concentrated enough, that it develops a will of its own—and that will becomes so vast it requires a form with which to move through the world. This is the form it chose. Wings. Fire. Scales that are not truly scales, but mana condensed until it resembles matter.
Killing something like that is impossible.
Not because they are physically invulnerable. But because destroying a Primordial Dragon would be the equivalent of destroying one of the world’s fundamental laws. The world does not allow it. Reality simply reorganizes itself around the attempt, and the dragon continues to exist on the other side of that reorganization, perhaps slightly confused... for a few centuries.
[gap]
—Selarindë found the seal. I will not describe what it cost her to find it because I have no words for it, and because some things should remain only in the memory of those who lived them, rather than being passed on as though they were neutral knowledge.
The seal worked.
I write those words and still cannot fully believe them.
The Primordial did not die. I want to record that with absolute clarity, because I know the Council will write something else in the official archives, and I cannot stop them. But I can at least ensure that somewhere, a true account of what happened exists. He did not die. We bent him. We convinced reality, if only temporarily, to hold something it was never meant to hold, and he is there now—wherever the seal placed him—and he is waiting with the patience of something that has no comprehensible relationship with time.
Their mere existence destabilizes the fabric of the world.
The Council believed that was the problem.
I believe it is merely a symptom.
The real problem is what happens when the seal—
[terminal gap — mnemonic crystal fragmented beyond further recovery]
[end of fragment]