The Primordial Record

The audience, in every tier, leaned forward.

The motion was not coordinated, as they were not a single thing, despite being grafted to the Painter’s flesh.

They were individuals, each with their own appetites, their own histories, their own preferred textures of suffering.

Some of them had been watching the Painter’s work for so long they had forgotten they were watching; they had become the watching, and the watching had become them.

But when Eos turned to face them and spoke to them instead of the Painter, they moved as if they had a single mind.

Eos had never addressed the audience directly. In the first age, he had been the cultivator of the meal, and the meal had been his Existence, and the audience had eaten it without ever seeing the cook.

In the second age, he had been the bearer of the Taste, and the audience had watched him bear it, and the bearing had been a flavor they had not known they wanted.

Now he stood, faced them, and he spoke.

"I am Eos," he said. "I am the so-called forty-fourth Tenth Dimensional Immortal to become the subject of your desires."

The audience knew this, they had been eating him for two ages. But hearing him say it, in his own voice, standing rather than sitting, was different. The voice carried through the tiers differently as his voice had a texture the audience had not tasted before.

It was strange, considering that he was the first being to ever exist to speak to them directly.

"I have been the meal," Eos said. "I have been the bearer. I have been the cultivator. Now I will be the server."

The Painter, who was in front of him, but Eos’s presence had pushed it behind him, made a sound.

A strange sound of surprise, and the audience, in the tiers that had been waiting for novelty, recognized the sound as something they had not heard in millions of Existences.

The Painter was uncertain, and not even the presence of invaders in the Eternal Tower had shaken it like this, because ultimately the Tower was an outside object, and the audience was itself.

"You cannot serve what you have not made," the Painter growled, and the uncertainty was in its voice, and the audience heard it.

"I have made everything you have fed them," Eos said. "The Tree. The branches. The worlds. The lives. The suffering you expressed through the Taste was expressed through my substrate. The flavors you released were released into my medium. You have been serving my work, and you have been calling it yours. The audience knows this. The audience has always known this. The audience has been eating my work and calling it your service, and they have been waiting for the moment when I would stand and claim it."

He turned his head slightly, not looking away from the audience but acknowledging the Painter’s presence with the tilt of his chin.

"You have been the waiter," Eos said. "I have been the kitchen. Now I am the server, and you may continue to wait, or you may sit, or you may leave. The audience will eat what I bring.

Eos raised his hand, and he shed the light of a tenth-dimensional being, leaving a normal hand behind.

This was the hand of a man who had once been a mortal child, who had once been a miner, who had once died in a room full of his own bodies and awakened to a book in his chest.

The hand was small, by the scale of the amphitheater, and yet the attention this hand brought was absolute.

The audience had been eating Eos for two ages, and they knew that his smallness was not a measure of his capacity. His smallness was a measure of his restraint, and his restraint was the most exquisite flavor they had tasted in millions of Existences.

"I will serve," Eos said, "what I have been keeping."

He opened his hand, and in the Origin Tree, on every branch, in every world, in every life that had been expressed by the hunger of the Painter, something shifted.

This shift did not stop the flavor that was spreading all over the Origin Tree as the Painter’s flavors continued to express, the suffering continued to spread, and the audience continued to eat.

But underneath the suffering, in the substrate of the Tree, in the medium that Eos had built and the Painter had used, something else was happening.

The Origin Tree was remembering its Telos.

Eos had built the Tree to be a repository of everything, not just the present, not just the past, but the potential, the what-might-have-been, the branch that did not grow but could have grown.

The Tree held all of this, and the Tree had been holding it since the first age, and the Painter had been eating the Tree’s fruit without ever tasting the roots.

Now Eos opened the roots.

The memories that Krynnex was forgetting, the false memories that the poison of the Painter had implanted, these were not the only memories in the Tree’s substrate. There were also true memories, deep memories, memories that predated the voice of the Painter, memories that predated the Painter’s interference, memories that went back to the first age, to the moment when Eos had planted the first seed and watched it grow.

Eos opened the roots, and the true memories began to rise.

They did not rise quickly and it was a good thing that the Painter did not try to stop him, and the Painter’s flavors were still expressing, and the volume was immense.

And so the true memories had to push through the poison to reach the surface. But they rose, and as they rose, the audience in the tiers that could taste the substrate began to register a new flavor.

The flavor was not suffering. The flavor was not pain. The flavor was not the exquisite texture of a thing being unmade... This flavor was grief.

This was not the grief of a being watching its loved ones suffer, the Painter had served that flavor for millions of Existences. This was a different grief, and the Painter was frozen in place when he saw it.

The flavor Eos showed them was the grief of a creator watching his creation be used, watching his work be served as a meal, watching his children be eaten by an audience that had never asked what the children were for.

The audience had never tasted this grief before. The Painter had never served it, because the Painter could not create, and grief of this kind required creation.

The audience, in every tier, tasted Eos’s grief.