Rowan had not gathered information about the past of Doom Star solely from the souls of the dead alone. He knew that the World Stele might be aware of his talent for soul-devouring; it had seen him manipulate events with the Primordial Keepers in order to implicate the Eye of Time. Rowan had exposed all of this important information deliberately, and his reason for doing so was to avoid revealing the fact that he had already been on Doom Star before the World Stele had returned to the realm.
If Rowan could only read the memories of the souls that were in this realm, then he would be stuck with only what they knew and what the World Stele would choose to tell him. As Rowan clearly understood, history was deceptive enough in its retelling, and adding the interests of another party would skew the narrative in their favor ten times out of ten.
He needed the full truth about Doom Star, and the only way to learn it was to see it with his own eyes.
After Thenos was killed and the World Stele was banished outside of Reality, there was a massive period of time when nothing living existed in this realm. What remained here was the body of Thenos, which was rapidly being infiltrated by darkness—at least, this was what the World Stele had told him. It turned out that this was the truth, but it was not all of it. The World Stele had left out part of the story.
Even Rowan was unaware that his Reflection could travel so far into the past that it almost overwhelmed the connection he had with the Reflection, leaving only a tiny thread. However, one attribute that he had placed in all his Reflections was independence, because he believed that, in the end, they would always seek the betterment of the main body, since fundamentally they were all extensions of his will.
This Reflection found himself in a world of darkness and ruin. It was a scene of endless devastation that extended far beyond the horizon, the ruin of a battlefield that could hold a million universes.
Thenos might not have been born yet, but the Sirens, his mothers, were powerful, and they had crushed the numerous armies sent toward them.
Making his way slowly through the battlefield, this Reflection spent millions of years traversing through it until he reached the center and found the remnants of the final war.
In the future, when the World Stele had found Thenos, it had seen the body of the Sirens splayed on the ground, her stomach cut open, and the remains of the infant in the womb peeking through. But the truth was that the state of the body of the Sirens was much worse.
The Reflection had found her massive corpse, and it had been crucified on a spear that had rooted itself in the sky. Thenos's body was not inside the womb; instead, it was on the ground with his placenta cord trailing from the open stomach of the Sirens. From the position his body was lying in, it seemed that the child had been trying to escape after the Sirens had been beheaded and their stomach slashed open, but he did not go far before he was beheaded. It was most likely that he did not even have the chance to cry out.
Frozen at this sight, the Reflection could hardly take his eyes away from this dead titan. Everything about it was extremely surreal, and even with the breadth of Rowan's experience, it was still an awe-inspiring sight to see something so great and yet so horrifying.
He realized it was the size of everything. The Reflection had never felt so small.
This sight shook him to the extent that it took a while before he noticed a presence pressing against his mind with cruel intensity. When he did, it seemed to have acknowledged its existence, and the Reflection's head exploded, followed by his body. Even those body parts soon collapsed into ash.
It was unknown how long it took for the Reflection to rise again, but the powers of Rowan's dimensional flesh, although diluted, were still able to drag it from the realm of death until he arose once more from his ashes.
What nearly killed him, he realized, was the spear. It was alive in a manner that was hard to pin down, and Rowan, who had seen many weapons and was on the way to forging greater ones, knew that this weapon was one fit for a Primordial.
He had died when he allowed his mind to collect every trace of information carried by the weapon, but he did not regret it, because he was able to learn how Doom Star came to an end.@@novelbin@@
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