The Primordial Fire: Part 1
Short Fiction
The harsh fluorescents hummed, casting Ewan’s pallid features in a sickly glow as he struggled to convince yet another mental health worker that he wasn’t, in fact, insane.
“I’m telling you, she was my ancestor from ancient times! She appeared and gave me a message about my true destiny before crumbling to dust…”
The clinician’s pen scratched across her notepad, her expression a studied mask of polite detachment. “And this…object you were found holding? You believe it to be some kind of mystical talisman?”
Ewan’s fingers tightened reflexively around the heavy golden torc. “The Sai’ithin Torc, a repository of druidic power forged by Ardhanaak herself aeons ago. When I touched it, it awoke the old crone from her slumber to pass on her line’s primordial legacy to me.”
At this, the woman’s professional facade faltered, a flicker of doubt passing across her features. Ewan pressed on urgently.
“Don’t you see? I’m to be the next in the line of the K’nah’lur — Wielders of the Primal Fire! Ardhanaak told me an hour of reckoning is coming, that I’ll be summoned to remake this world according to the old powers!”
The clinician regarded him for a long moment, then made another notation. “I’m afraid these delusions of grandeur, combined with your catatonic wandering, point to an extreme psychogenic break, Mr. McAllister. We’ll need to keep you here for observation while we explore treatment options…”
As she continued outlining the draconian prescription — sedatives, possible involuntary committal — Ewan’s head swam in dizzy confusion and frustration. How could they be so obtuse? Didn’t they understand the cosmic gravity of the primeval chrysalis he was undergoing?
Perhaps a demonstration would shake their mundane perception free from its self-imposed blinders. Trembling with amplifying anger and adrenaline, Ewan clutched the torc tighter, willfully channelling his newfound inner fires…
That’s when all hell broke loose on the ward.
A concussive shock-wave emanated from his talisman, explosive energies rippling outward in arcing tendrils of ethereal plasma. Equipment flew in all directions as the room’s contents were scattered by the metaphysical blast.
The stunned clinicians were thrown against the far wall, crumpling amidst the debris as Ewan rose, now swathed in a shimmering aura of crimson and incandescence. He gasped at the relentless power coursing through his veins, scorching his vision with mystical sigils invisible to the mortal sphere.
As the overwhelmed medical team cowered in terror, their screams of alarm mingling with the distant wail of emergency klaxons, Ewan channelled the potent confluence of ancestral might, bellowing a proclamation that shook the very foundations:
“Can you comprehend it now, you blind rationers?? This is the primordial fire of which I am the consecrated vessel! The hoary legacy of Ardhanaak’s Druidic dominion over all of existence!”
He raised the torc on high, brimming with visions of global apocalypse and re-creation under his burgeoning might. “This world shall be unmade, then reborn in my razing purge of negativity! All shan’ar realities shall be subsumed by my transcendental fire until a new infinite consciousness finally prevails!”
As the facility’s sprinklers rained down amidst panicked shouts and screams, Ewan McAllister — formerly a taciturn, unassuming hillwalker — strode forth, every inch the scion of primeval chaos foretold. His metamorphosis into the dreaded K’nah’lur was now complete, and soon the universe entire would be his crucible in which to forge a new cosmic awareness…
The staff’s calls for backup were too late; by the time the reinforcements arrived, the room was empty, a smouldering crater in the floor the only evidence that something cataclysmic had occurred.
Ewan — or whatever unholy entity he had become — was gone. Potent supernatural energies swirling in his wake, thirsting for worlds to consume and remake with the scorching beneficence of oblivion.
The age of the K’nah’lur’s fiery truth had begun.
