The Primordial Record - Chapter 2099 The Painter
Chapter 2099 The Painter
Eos saw every version of him that had ever existed across all possible realities. Most had failed. Most had watched their children and families die. Most had been devoured by the Primordials, or corrupted by End, or simply faded when the last light went out. But one version, the one standing here, on the edge of the Tenth, had done something none of the others had.
He had looked beyond what none of the others had dared to search for.
It was not as if he had not lost anyone; he had lost as much as they had, but he had never stopped looking for the truth. Most of the other selves had not acquired the Will of Truth, and even the few that did, inevitably left it to the side as they pursued power.
They had forgotten that the power that they pursued had been tainted from the beginning, and in their hubris, they did not check again and again to be assured that the power they thought they controlled was just a sham.
He did not know why he was able to see his other selves when he could not do the same for the rest, but he thought it must be because he was here outside the ninth dimension and looking in.
Basically, he was looking at multiple Existences standing side by side, but his perception was still too weak, and he could only observe himself.
This was also a truth that had been lost from Existence, as he realized that the Beast of Final Rest did not just reach into the past, but he also reached across these other parallel existences.
The thought of something like this was so stunning that Eos could not even comprehend it for a few moments. He shifted his perception to search for the Beast, and he found it and also the road that the Beast had been offered. It was a corrupted thread leading deeper into the Tenth, toward a throne made of every ending that had ever been refused.
The Beast was already crawling along that thread, broken and leaking, but growing stronger with every desperate inch, and the Beast would have been much stronger than it was if not for the interference of Eos, who planted the seed of the truth inside its heart.
However, behind the Beast, he saw Nyxara’s hunger, which resembled a black flame that would eventually consume the entire painting if left unchecked. This flame was pursuing the Beast, and it was pushing it towards only one direction… End.
Now Eos was able to observe the true form of End, and yet its form was still vague, but if he had not gained the experience of observing Existence from its smallest state to its largest, then he would not have been able to figure out what he was looking at.
The truth was that End was not a force as he had first believed, nor was it a being with malicious intention born from the madness of a tortured god; this was what a lower-dimensional being would interpret End as, but here, he saw End as what it was… it was the blank space between every brushstroke.
It was the perfect, patient emptiness that waited for the painter to finish. End was not coming to destroy existence. End was the reason existence had been allowed to begin in the first place, so that it could one day be completed and set aside.
Existence had been erased and repainted many times, and End was that eraser. Without its touch, then there would be no new Existence, and the old would rot away for all eternity. A fate that was many times worse than death.
Yet all of this called attention to a single fact: if there was a painting, then there must be a painter. The painting of Existence did not come from nothing; there was a design here, and everything that happened inside Existence was a reflection of the intention of the painter.
Fate and Destiny were a lie; it had always been stolen from everyone inside Existence, and it was done in order to suppress the hunger of those who would have fought for their freedom.
How could a man fight to escape his cage when he did not even know he was in a cage? There was no Fate nor Destiny, only what the painter allowed to roam inside his painting… Destiny was the errant brushstrokes that were not entirely under the control of the painter.
Knowledge as power, and these words could not be any more important in this moment, because as soon as Eos realized there could be a painter, he saw the brush, and the hand that held it.
He could not see beyond the hand, because whatever dwelled there could not be seen. There was a fundamental gap between his existence and that of the unknown painter, as if it were like a character in a book trying to understand the makeup of its author.
Yet in this uncertainty, Eos glimpsed a very small part of the final equation.
Whoever this painter was, they were not satisfied with their creation, and it was not because the creation in itself was bad, but because the painter had no control over what they were painting.
The only power it had was the power to erase what came before as they sought to make something that was close to their unknown ideal. Existence after Existence had been erased because they did not fit the narrative, and over time, this painter had become so adept at the act of erasure that it seemed to have forgotten its purpose in the first place.
Eos saw that under the hands of this painter, the Ten Thousand Origin Lands were not a sanctuary for the last seed of creation; they were the variable it could not control.
Eos gasped when he finally realized that the brush he was looking at was the physical representation of Origin itself, and Origin, in essence, was chaos, and this hand wanted to control this chaos and reshape it into its image.
Time was meaningless here, and this painter was infinitely patient, and as Eos was gaping in astonishment, he suddenly realized that one of the fingers from that brush had shifted, and it was slowly rising, and pointing towards him.
