Chapter 2233: The World Is Full of Mouth |
Eos had not forgotten how could he ever forget the moment he stepped outside Existence for the first time and saw the true face of the dimensions and then saw the hand of the Painter in the distance... he had turned around and saw that the entirety of Existence, everything that he knew, loved, and hated was just a painting.
There were a few things that could shake him up to that extent, and this was one of them. Reaching the tenth dimension, he had seen many truths about what happened on that day, including the fact that the Painter had suppressed his ascension to the tenth dimension by hiding the truth of the Concept of Immortality from him.
The Painter could not directly claim Eos’s immortality, or that would have alerted Eos to its manipulations, but he could cover this concept with darkness, making it harder for him to reach it, and until he fought till he emerged from Existence and fused with it, he was able to fully touch the concept of immortality.
He did not fully see the entire portion of the grand game that the Painter was making until this moment, and it was not yet over, as the Painter turned its hand palm up.
"This is what you were preserving," it said. "You sat in your throne and grew a Tree across the Grand Void and watched it bloom and called it your work. It was my work. You were my hand. The new Existence is not new. It is the forty-fourth iteration of a painting I have been refining since before Origin had a name."
Saying this, the board rippled and Eos began to see various connection he had not seen before, and everything was becoming clearer in his sights, "The decisions you believed you were making, the Telos crown, the Origin Realms, the trillion-branch Tree, the seeding of Aether becoming Ether becoming Telos, were decisions made inside a frame that produced exactly those decisions, because the frame was designed to produce them. You have been performing my Existence for me. I have been letting you because performance is one of the flavors my audience prefers, and because the performance is more interesting when the performer believes the performance is original."
The Painter raised its arms to its open face and sighed, "As much as I hate it, I cannot create. Origin hides this gift from me, so I have to use all these roundabout options to get what I want."
Eos watched the countless audience in the Painter’s face sneer in anger and rage, and he saw more than half of them screaming, but their voices were silent, hidden inside the head of the Painter.
The Painter studied Eos’s face. "You are taking this well," it said. "I expected this. You are the first one who has not crumbled at the disclosure. Forty-three of your predecessors were told some version of this, and the disclosure was sufficient to break them; the second ages of those Existences were short, and the meals were thin. Hahahah, but I knew that you would not break at the disclosure. I have measured you. You will bear the disclosure, and the bearing will become the architecture of the second age. You will bear it while I do what I am about to do to your Tree. That is the meal. That has always been the meal. The mortals are seasoning. The Tree is the plate. Your bearing is what my audience came for."
Its hand rose to its open face, and its fingers began to dance around as if it was indecisive about the path it was about to take, and with a final laugh of acknowledgment, its hand reached into one of the audience’s tiers and drew out something the audience had loaned it for the occasion.
The thing the Painter drew out had no name in any language Origin or Truth could parse. It was a taste. The Painter had borrowed the taste from one of the audience members, a particular figure in the eighty-quintillionth tier, a being whose preferred flavor was a thing it would take Eos most of the next Cosmic Era to fully comprehend, and the Painter was now going to apply the taste to the substrate of the Tree.
It was important to note that the Painter was not introducing anything. It was expressing a property the substrate already had, and no matter what it was about to do, Eos had no way to stop it.
This was the part Eos understood, watching the move, that he had not understood before. The Painter was not violating his Tree. The Painter was using the Tree the way a musician uses an instrument that the musician built. The instrument was Eos. The instrument had been built to play the song the Painter was about to play.
It was not only the board that was rigged; the entire substrate upon which Existence was built was corrupted.
What the Painter drew out of its face was a taste, and the closest expression of this taste in any functional mind was... the world is full of mouths. With a glee that only it could fully understand as it observed Eos’ helplessness, the Painter applied this taste.
If it had played this move at the beginning of the game, then Eos would not fully understand the ramifications of what it was doing, and after multiple Grand Cosmic Eras had passed, and Eos was beginning to develop confidence in his abilities at the tenth dimensional level, making this the right time for him to be crushed.
The Origin Tree was infinite; it had branches without a final number. Eos had built it to be without limit because limit was a concept that belonged to the old Existence, and the new Existence had been made to refuse limits.
The number of branches was not countable. The number of worlds across those branches was countable only in the sense that any infinity is countable, which is to say not in any practical sense; the worlds were beyond enumeration, and the lives across those worlds were beyond the worlds, and the moments across those lives were beyond the lives.
And yet, the power of the tenth dimension could not be understood with common sense at the taste reached out to this infinity.
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