The Primordial Record - Chapter 2232 Surely You Must Have Felt It

The Painter gestured, but it was not at the audience in its face but at Eos himself.

“Tell me,” the Painter said. “What are you made of?”

Eos did not answer the question because something told him that the Painter would not even want him to answer, as it was glorying in this moment. This being knew that it had thrown Eos off his game, and there was no way that it would not take advantage of this.

“You are made of Telos,” the Painter said. Then it whispered, “Purpose. The end a thing is for. The medium of the tenth dimension. You believe Telos to be yours because you fused it from Origin and Truth at the top of the Eternal Tower, reorganized your being around it, and grew an Origin Tree out of it. Yes?”

Again, Eos did not answer because it did not feel like the Painter was asking him a question, only ensuring that Eos was following every word it was saying.

“Telos is not yours,” the Painter said with a finality that shook the space around them. “Telos was never yours. Telos was not even the previous tenth-dimensional being that stood before this table. What was her name? Ah, yes, Elura. Do you like what I did there? I used a piece of a defeated tenth-dimensional being to birth a new one. I made you Eos, and the one before… and the one before.”

There was silence as countless beings in the face of the Painter looked at Eos, as if waiting for any single bit of emotion he would let out so that they could feed. The feeling of having quadrillions upon countless quadrillions of hungry eyes staring at you was something that was hard for an immortal mind to fathom. “Telos has been mine for so long that the word mine loses precision when applied to the relationship. Telos is the medium I have been working in since long before Origin existed. Origin is a recent invention. A clever child’s improvisation. A faculty that came into being inside a substance I was already shaping. Your Origin sees what is real; what is real, in the tenth dimension, is what I have permitted to be real. Your Truth sees what is true; what is true, in the tenth dimension, is what I have not yet erased. Your sight is bounded by faculties that were born inside my medium and cannot perceive the medium itself, because perceiving the medium would require a faculty that predates Origin, and you have no such faculty.”

The Painter paused, and the audience in its face was very attentive, and Eos made sure that he kept his features still, despite the fact that countless feelings of shock and anger were pouring through his mind. ‘I have been here before,’ he told himself, ‘this is nothing new, I won then, and I will win again.’

“You have been gardening,” the Painter said, “in my soil. The Origin Tree is not your work in the sense you believed it was. The Origin Tree is what grows in my soil when a tenth dimensional candidate plants seeds in it. It grows infinitely because my soil is generous to gardeners I find worth cultivating. It grows beautifully because I have refined the soil, across forty-three previous failures and millions of Existences before them, to grow beautiful things. Every branch of your Tree is rooted in something I poured into the substrate of Telos before you were born. Every world is fed by my preparation. Every life is composed of materials I shaped for the purpose of being composed.”

The Painter let this settle in Eos’s consciousness, and countless trillions of faces smiled inside its face.

“You will object that I am lying,” the Painter said. “You will object that this is the Painter’s voice trying to demoralize you before the meal. Test the claim. Examine your Tree. Examine the texture of your own being. You will find that you cannot examine the medium of your being, because the medium is what you examine with. You can use Origin to look at things. You cannot use Origin to look at Origin. You cannot use Truth to look at Truth. You cannot use Telos to look at Telos. The faculties that perceive cannot perceive the substance they are made of. This is a structural fact about how perception works, and I built it. I built perception this way deliberately, across millions of Existences, by making sure that whatever faculty a tenth-dimensional being developed for seeing, the seeing would always rest on a substrate it could not turn its eye onto. The blind spot is not a flaw in your sight. The blind spot is the architecture I painted you with.”

Eos did not move, and he tried not to observe himself, because he knew that if he did this, he was finally validating everything that the Painter was saying.

The Painter clapped his hands together, creating a shockwave that rippled across the entire board and was felt by every being in every world on the Origin Tree, a casual flex of power that only those in this realm could do.

“This is why the Cancellation works,” the Painter crooned. “The Cancellation is not a piece I place into your Tree from outside. The Cancellation is a property I built into the medium your Tree is grown in. When I lift the Cancellation in my hand, I am not introducing a foreign object into your domain; I am expressing a property your domain has always had, because your domain is grown in soil that has the property. The Erasure is the same. The audience is the same. The amphitheater is the same. None of these are intrusions. They are features of the substrate I have used to compose every Existence I have ever painted, and they have always been features of every Existence’s substrate, and the substrate of your Existence is the same substrate, because there is only one substrate, and I made it.”

The body of the Painter bent across the board and brought its horrifying face to Eos and whispered, “Surely you must have felt it, Eos, the time you went out of that broken Existence, and you saw my hand. You saw the painting, but you never asked yourself what happened to the paintbrush.”