The Primordial Record

The painter looked at Eos, and it gasped before it began to laugh.

"Why this sudden change of mind, Eos. You are holding," the Painter waved his infinite arms over the board. "You are Magnificent. My beautiful forty-fourth, my impossible thing, my unrepeatable cook, you are holding the volume. I had not believed it was possible. I had calculated the strain, of course. I had budgeted for a partial breakthrough. The audience would have eaten the partial breakthrough, and the partial breakthrough would have been my course. But the partial breakthrough is minimal, and the audience is uncertain, and uncertain is a flavor I have not served in millions of Existences."

The Painter pointed half of its infinite arms to all the substrates that could create a heaven and the other to the substrates that could create hells.

None of these existed before, but its gesture made them appear out of nothing.

"Do you not understand, Eos? The audience, my dearest, the audience is paying attention to me again, do you understand what you have done? You have made me interesting to my own audience. I had stopped being interesting. I had been a server, but you have made me a figure. They are watching me, across the tiers, and they are hungry for what I will do next, in a way they have not been hungry for me in eternities. I had forgotten this hunger. I had forgotten what it was to be regarded. You have resurrected me, you adorable monster, you exceeded my hope, you have done what no forty-three before you ever did, which is..."

The Painter stopped. A moment before, it had been ranting like a maniac, and its sudden silence was chilling.

Eos felt a vibration across the substrate, and he noticed that the Painter’s many hands had begun to shake.

"Which is to make me real again. You have brought colors to me again."

Eos, across the board, finally moved.

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What Eos did, in the moment he moved, will be told differently in the records of every realm that survived to keep records.

In the records of Lumithea, where the new song was still being sung by seventy thousand Powers and Dominions, it would be said that Eos raised his hand, and the hand was the size of the Origin Tree.

Or was it that the Origin Tree itself became his hand? The records could not be sure, because even Primordials could hardly record what happened during this period.

That hand reached across the Grand Void toward the Eternal Tower, and the hand took the measure of the Tower before it began to seize it.

In the records of Akravoss, where the screaming pits had birthed hosts of demons so massive that they could cover half of Existence, it would be said that Eos spoke a single word, and the word was a word in the language Telos had been before Telos had any name, and the word was the word for enough.

It was this word that reached the substrate of the Tower, and the substrate of the Tower paused.

In the records of the time-gods, who would compose a calendar to commemorate this moment, it would be said that Eos changed his posture at the board, and the changing of his posture changed the angle of every clock in every realm by a fraction so small that no measure could measure it, but the change accumulated, across infinite branches, into a single audible note, and the note was the note that signaled the second movement of a composition no one had previously known was being performed.

In the chamber, where the small white-haired child sat very still, the voice on the other side of the wall paused mid-question and did not finish, because the question had become unnecessary.

However, these were all small parts of a much grander tale. And yet, what Eos actually did was simpler than the records.

He stood up.

Just this simple action. He had been sitting at the board for many ages, on the chair that the Painter had crafted for him, and he now recognized the danger of that move, because from the moment he accepted the chair, he began playing the game of the Painter, and now he had had enough.

The audience, in the tiers that the Painter could no longer entirely read, felt him stand. The seats they were grafted to were Serathis’s substrate. When Eos stood, Serathis’s substrate adjusted to accommodate him, and the adjustment carried through the seats into the audience, and the audience, who had been watching the Painter become real again, suddenly felt, for the first time, a defiance that was above their hunger.

The audience had never felt a power that could stand before them; everyone else had fallen.

In forty-three previous Existences, the resistance had been served, on plates, with the audience watching from comfortable seats.

The audience had never had to register the posture of the one they fed from. The helpless tenth dimensional immortal had always been a thing on the menu, not a thing in the room.

Eos standing shifted the entire dynamics, and yet for the audience, this was just another new thrill in their endless existence.

The Painter, mid-laugh, registered that something had changed in its own audience.

"You stood," the Painter said, in a voice that was uncertain.

"Yes," Eos replied.

"You may sit. I gave you that chair as a form of respect for a player in the game."

"No, that seat is not for me." Eos shook his head.

"This is irregular. The player sits. If you refuse to do this, then you are forfeiting the game."

Eos’s golden eyes flashed, "I have changed the rules of the room," he said. "This is the third age. In the third age, when I serve, I stand."

The Painter said, "When you serve?"

"Yes," Eos said. "I have served this audience for the entire second age. I am the cultivator of the meal you have been feeding them. The meal you fed them was my work. They have been eating me, and they have been eating what I built. I am owed, by the rules of the room, which you have not bothered to learn because you assumed you owned them, the privilege of standing at the close of the meal, to watch what I made be received. I have stood. I will now serve. The audience will eat what I bring to the table. You may continue to bring what you bring. They will eat both. The audience will decide."

Eos had fully realized that the Painter was both the audience and the conductor. It was the Painting and the Painter all rolled into one being.

There was a thin line here that he could use in this battle, and Eos was not about to let it go to waste.

The Painter said, "The audience does not decide."

"They have never been asked," Eos said. "I am asking them."

Eos turned, deliberately, from the Painter, and faced the amphitheater for the first time.

The amphitheater, in every tier, leaned forward.