The Primordial Record

Serathis paused in her work. She had been eating in a region of the Tower’s strata, deep in the meat of the structure, where the Painter’s presence was felt only as a distant pressure. The trembling was new. The trembling meant that the Painter’s attention was no longer entirely on the board.

Eos had divided its attention across the Origin Tree, the Eternal Tower, and the substrate on which everything rested. The Painter was ridiculously powerful, and the only way to win would be to tear its mind into parts and make it fight on a field it was familiar with.

"Good," Serathis thought. "Keep your eyes on the Tree. I will be here when you look down."

She resumed eating.

Ⓟ

In the time-layers of the Eternal Tower’s past, Chronomancer Prime unwound another foundational decision.

The decision was old, so old that it predated the concept of age. It was a decision the Painter had made about the relationship between the Tower’s substrate and the Tower’s audience, a decision that had established, in the earliest layers of the Tower’s construction, that the audience would be grafted to the Painter’s flesh rather than seated in a structure that could be removed.

As he dug deeper, Prime began to understand more about the Painter than any being that had ever been born before, not even Eos, and the deeper he went, the better he began to understand the ultimate enemy against all life.

This digging was the hardest thing that Prime knew he would ever undertake in his life, for the sheer fact that the Painter had lived for so long and it was so powerful that just one of its remnants was so massive and extremely dangerous to understand, that Prime would have long given up if he did not know how important his task was, and the fact that he was the only one who could do this.

Prime had been working on this one portion of the Painter’s secret for a Cosmic Era. It was a difficult portion to unwind, because this part of the Painter’s past was not a single point but a pattern, and the pattern was distributed across thousands of time-layers, and each time-layer had to be accessed in a specific sequence to avoid collapsing the entire architecture.

Prime’s hands moved through the time-layers like a weaver’s shuttle through a loom. The portion was beginning to show a gap. The gap was small, barely visible even to Prime’s perception, but it was there.

One more, Prime thought. One more, and the audience will not be grafted. They will be seated. And a seat can be removed.

He reached for the next time-layer.

Above him, there was a loud rumble as the flavors released by the Painter began to dig through the Eternal Tower, and Prime worked faster... if these flavors reached him, then the danger he would face would become unprecedented.

He pushed himself into the next time-layer. A time-layer was both a place and a moment, and the opposite was also the truth, as this distinction did not need to hold when it came to the Eternal Tower.

The Painter had built the Tower to be something other than time, and what Prime was moving through was the residue of the Painter’s decisions, the sediment of choices made and not unmade, accumulating across the Tower’s construction like layers of sediment in a river that had been flowing for so long the river had forgotten it was a river.

Prime was not a being who tired. He had been made by Eos to work, and working was his nature. But even he felt the weight of the accumulation.

The decisions he had already unwound pressed against him from the time-layers he had left behind, a kind of phantom gravity that made each new reach more difficult than the last.

And he had to move faster, because the poison of the Painter was following behind.

Ⓟ

On a world on a branch whose distance from the Origin Tree’s trunk cannot be expressed in numbers because numbers at this scale lose meaning, a young god named Aelith watched his pantheon die.

Aelith was a minor god of forgotten things. His domain was the small, the overlooked, the memory that fades before it is fully formed. He had been a god for twelve million years, which is not long for a god, and he had spent those years content in his obscurity.

When the Taste reached his world, it did not come for him. It came for his pantheon first, because the Painter’s audience had requested a course that began with the strong and worked downward, and the Painter had obliged.

Aelith watched the Sky Father, whose voice had been thunder for a hundred thousand years, open his mouth to speak a blessing and instead begin to recite the names of every child he had ever fathered, in order, from oldest to youngest, and reciting them in a voice that grew softer with each name until the Sky Father’s throat closed and he choked on the last name.

The last name was the name of a child who had died before the Sky Father had learned to love, and the Sky Father had never spoken that name aloud until the audience demanded it.

Aelith watched the Earth Mother, whose hands had shaped mountains, use those hands to unmake every living thing within her reach, starting with her own temple, then her priests, then her family, then herself, in an order the Taste had specified for the audience member in the eighty-second tier, who preferred a particular rhythm of unmaking.

He watched the Harvest God, whose body was grain and whose blood was wine, begin to rot from the inside, the rot spreading at a rate calibrated to the audience member in the twelfth tier, who enjoyed the slow collapse of abundance into famine.

Aelith watched this madness for a thousand years. The audience did not permit him to look away, as they had designated him as the witness for this pantheon, and a witness does not participate in the event; a witness watches.

When the last god of his pantheon was gone, the Sky Father’s throat closed forever, the Earth Mother’s hands still, the Harvest God reduced to a field of ash, the audience released Aelith’s eyes and permitted him to move.

He did not move. He stood among the ruins of his pantheon and did not move for another thousand years, because he was a god of forgotten things, and he understood, now, that he had been forgotten by the only being whose memory could have saved him.

It was unknown whether this was one of the final strokes that broke Eos’s patience, but at this moment, he placed his hands on the board, and he growled, "Enough! I have seen enough."