The Primordial Record - Chapter 2211 The Signature of The Defeated

Chapter 2211 The Signature of The Defeated

Eos crossed the Grand Void on foot. He wore a robe of white with golden hems, and his hair was also as white as snow, and it reached his back.

There were faint hints of facial hair on his face, as if he had not shaved for a few days, and except for his impossible size, where he could hold trillions of Realities on the palm of his hand, he appeared like a normal man.

However, for him, size was ultimately meaningless at this point, because he could be as big and as small as the situation demanded him to be.

A ninth-dimensional immortal could cross the Grand Void, but they would spend so long doing so that if they ever reached the other side, only their bones would arrive as they would be long dead along the way, and only the momentum of their bodies would carry them through.

There was no reason for Eos to cross the Grand Void on foot, since distance had stopped meaning what it once meant the moment his body completed. But he walked anyway, because walking was a verb and verbs belonged to the one who acted, and he wanted the Tower to watch him come slowly, at his own pace, along a path of his own choosing.

Small insolences mattered at this level. They were almost the only insolences that did.

He had always treasured his mortal roots, and his every action at the moment was a defining characteristic of who he was, and he wanted the Great One… no, the Luminious called that being this name, he wanted The Painter, to know who he was.

The Origin Tree spread behind him as he went. It had crossed some threshold of scale that made numbers unhelpful; it was not a tree of a certain size any longer, but a tree of a certain weight, and the weight pressed outward in every direction into the substrate of the void.

Wherever the weight pressed, the void changed. Things that had been inert for eras remembered they had once been alive. A compressed vein of dead-history near Eos’s right ankle stirred and thought, very briefly, of a language it had once spoken. He passed on; it forgot again, but less completely than before.

There were things locked inside the Grand Void, pieces of forgotten histories that would take many years to explore, and if there was a chance to explore the Grand Void in the future, then Eos would delightfully take it.

The Tower grew closer. It had not moved, and it had never moved from the moment it was created as the Tower was a fixed mark in the Grand Void, the way a nail is a fixed mark in a plank, and every previous Existence had been a different plank, and the nail had held.

He reached up close, and he discovered that the material of the Tower was not bone. When he was at the ninth-dimensional level, he had thought it was bone, or a better word would be that he had told himself it was bone because the mind preferred a metaphor that could be held, even his own.

In the tenth dimension, there was no space for falsehood, especially to one’s own self, and he now saw that the actual material was signature of all the ones who had stepped forward to challenge the tyranny of the Painter.

They were the cured, set, hardened leavings of things that had once been made, stripped from them after the breaking and pressed into building stock.

The Tower was not a tomb, but a declaration of victory, an insult to the dead, as every brick was the fingerprint of something that had dared to stand against the Painter. That was why it could not fall. Its walls were the very habit of creation, turned against itself.

Eos laid a hand against one of the walls, and the wall pushed back, rejecting his presence, and he could almost hear the cries of the forty-three before him, whose very essence was forged to make this eternal tower, telling him to return.

In the past, when he was a mortal, Eos had seen visions of those who held the Primordial Record before him, great heroes who stood and fought against the third prince, and he almost smiled when he remembered something he had said then, and he would say now… the more things change, the more they stay the same.

A small problem was often a reflection of a much bigger one, as Existence could ot help but translate its sickness in the only way it knew how to do, and it was up to the wise to discern her voice.

The Tower spoke to him, although they did not use any language or have a voice, he understood them anyway, “You are not from here, for your making is not our making. You do not belong in the mouth of this Tower.

Eos said, mildly, “And still, I must come in anyway.”

The Tower did not answer. It opened, and Eos stepped through, walking into the home of his enemy.

He began to climb the tower, using a speed that would make what his incarnations resembled snails when they had first gained access to this tower.

He did not look at the floors as he passed them. He had expected to be shown things on the way up. Reminders. Previous loser, like photographs in a hallway. The standard theater of an old power impressing a new one.

The Tower did not bother, as the floors were empty.

This was more frightening than anything else that had happened to him since the fusion, and he allowed himself to feel the fright honestly before he set it aside.

The Tower did not need to impress him. The Tower did not need to remind him that forty-three powerful beings who should have reached the threshold of the tenth dimension, perhaps even crossed it, had come before.

That was a thing a proud structure would do, and the Tower was not proud. The Tower was almost… bored. The Tower had eaten forty-three arrivals and had not found any of them memorable, and the emptiness of the floors was the Tower’s way of saying so.

Eos looked around, and he continued his climb.

The top did not announce itself; one moment, he was climbing a seemingly endless tower, and the next, he was before a wooden door, and the moment Eos saw the door, it opened up, and he did not hesitate to walk through it.

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