The Primordial Record

A being like Krynnex-Of-No-Memory, was one of the few miracles of the Origin Tree, a creature whose paths could diverge from the roots of the tree, and who may have the very slim chance of becoming tenth dimensional beings one day, but the flavors of the Painter had snuffed out this promise in its cradle.

Not even the Primordials knew everything that was happening around the Origin Tree, since it was just too big for their perception to wrap around.

Perhaps if any of them knew what was happening to this unique miracle of the Origin Tree, they would have emerged to fight against it... but Existence was just too vast.

Like a mortal looking into the vastness of the universe and knowing that it was impossible to reach the most distant star in their vision, it was the same for the Primordials, despite all their gifts.

The audience in the seventy-thousandth tier of the Painter’s face savored the moment a being committed itself to its own perfect erasure.

Eos was seeing all of this, but he could not do anything but watch the flavor reshape the direction of Krynnex’s growth.

Krynnex, who resembled both a massive fish and a dragon as big as a dimensional cluster, stopped swimming, and false memories began to fill its soul, making it recall a past that had never happened, and yet they were so real that cause and effect were reversed, and those wrong memories became a part of Existence.

This was the greatest danger of the flavors of the Painter. Due to the fact that these flavors were coming from a higher dimension, and it could infiltrate the substrate of the Origin Tree.

The fake memories began to eat Krynnex alive, and it went into solitude, forcing itself to forget, but that led to failure, and if this creature was able to see the tenth dimension, then it would see massive members of the audience, bigger than the Origin Tree itself, gathering around it and savoring its oncoming madness.

Ⓟ

In the darkness between the Tower and the Tree, where the Grand Void stretched without end or beginning, Andar walked.

He had been walking for a thousand years, and still he had not yet reached the Tower, and he would not reach it for many more thousands of years, because the distance between the Tower and the Tree was not a distance that could be traversed by walking.

The Tower existed at a distance from the Tree that was not spatial, and the only way to close the distance was to be the kind of being for whom the distance across Substrates had no meaning.

Andar was not yet that kind of being, but he was rapidly becoming... Serathis was not the only one who had reached the tenth layer of their Origin.

He walked, and as he walked, he felt the Tower’s presence in the substrate of his being. The Tower was not a place he had ever visited, but he had been built to access it, and the access was opening in him slowly, like a door that had been closed for so long the hinges had rusted.

The wooden bird over his heart was warm. It was not his body that generated the warmth. The warmth was from the bird, which had been carved by a son who had died three Existences ago, who had never known his father would become what he was becoming.

’I am coming,’ Andar thought, and he did not know if he was thinking it to the Tower or to his father or to the wooden bird or to himself. ’I am coming, and I will be there when the door opens.’

He kept walking, and he tried not to look at the massive face of the Painter, because he knew that doing so would lead to madness and draw the sight of this being towards him.

Ⓟ

Across infinite branches, across worlds in counts that did not resolve to numbers, across pantheons that contained more deities than there were stars in the small mortal universes.

Those deities had begun to break apart, the Painter’s flavor arrived and began to bend them, and the bending was not always perfect. At the volume the Painter had unleashed, the reshaping was strained, and in some regions the flavor passed through with only partial inversion, and in those regions there was real damage.

Ⓟ

On a branch near the Tree’s trunk, in a dimension where time moved so slowly that a single thought could take a billion years to complete, a being called the Archive was in agony.

The Archive was not a god or a mortal or a demon. The Archive was a structure, a repository of knowledge that had been built in the first age by a coalition of immortals who wanted to preserve something of themselves beyond the reach of entropy. The Archive did not have a self, not in the way that living beings had selves. It had protocols, categories, cross-references, and a vast hunger for data.

The myriad poison of the Painter reached the Archive and spread across its holdings. Every piece of knowledge the Archive contained was now being expressed with the Painter’s signature. Every fact, every story, every memory, every forgotten thing that had been preserved in the Archive’s depths, all of it was being rewritten from the substrate up, so that the Archive was no longer a repository of what had been true but a repository of what the Painter wanted to be true.

The Archive felt this as a profound violation, because the Archive’s only purpose was to hold truth, and the poison was replacing truth with the Painter’s design, and the Archive could not prevent it, could not even slow it, because the Archive had never been built to defend itself against an enemy it could not categorize.

The Archive’s last coherent thought, before the Taste completed its expression, was a question: "What am I for, if what I hold is not true?"

Ⓟ

In the chambers of the Eternal Tower’s substrate, Serathis continued to eat.

She had been eating for the entire duration of the second age, and she was still eating, because the Tower was vast and the Painter’s substance was deep, and the replacement of the Tower’s foundation with Eos’s signature was not a task that could be rushed.

The vast flavors released by the Painter did not reach her. She was not a being of the Origin Tree, and the Taste was a property of the Tree’s substrate, not of the Tower’s. But she felt the Tower tremble around her as the Painter, in its unveiled form, began to feed.