Chapter 2234: A Smiling Face

The Primordial Record

The Taste, released by the Painter, did not reach all the worlds simultaneously, as the Painter was a connoisseur and would not have permitted simultaneity; simultaneity is the resort of beings who cannot afford pacing.

To a being of its level, suffering and depravity had to be stretched out in such an extended time period that it would be impossible for any lesser immortal to even comprehend the length of time that would pass while it feasted.

The taste reached the worlds in a wave, the Painter shaped by hand, beginning at the outermost branches and moving inward, so that the inhabitants of the inner branches would have time, in the early stages of the wave, to learn what was happening on the outer branches and to know it was coming for them.

This corruption expressed itself across the substrate of the Origin Tree, across trillions of branches, across the worlds carried by each branch in counts that did not resolve to numbers, across the infinite universes and dimensions inside each world, across the galaxies inside each universe, across the worlds inside each galaxy, across the lives that lived on those worlds, and it expressed, in every life it reached, with the precision the Painter had refined across millions of Existences.

Previously, the hand of the Painter from the Cancellation to Erasure had been done on a scale that was massive but also distant.

Those who were suffering under its changes were not fully aware of what was happening, and they just saw it as a part of life, especially when the Painter had insisted that it wanted to keep its presence away from the eyes of all life in Existence.

Now, the picture had changed, and the Painter ensured that the minds of those who were about to experience the Taste could understand what was happening to them.

There was not much suffering in bliss.

The Painter had specified to Eos, calmly, that the mortals were seasoning and the bearing was the meal, and the seasoning had to retain its flavor for the meal to taste right, and a mind dissolving into unconsciousness or madness was a flavor the Painter found... uninteresting.

As a creature that found pleasure in suffering, the Painter wanted minds present and awake, even more than this, the Painter wanted minds aware of what their bodies were doing, in real time, with full perceptive capacity, and the Painter had built the Taste to enforce this awareness as a positive property rather than rely on it as a default.

It was similar to setting a man on fire but ensuring there was enough adrenaline in his system to keep his mind awake for as long as possible.

And Eos could do nothing but watch as madness took root on the Origin Tree.

On a world on a branch, fifty trillion branches in from the Tree’s outermost edge, and this is the wrong way to describe the location, because the Tree had no outermost edge, and the count of fifty trillion was a small count compared to the count of branches between this world and any other arbitrarily chosen world.

However, the Painter’s activation indexed locations in ways that did not require coordinates, and the audience did not need coordinates to enjoy what was happening.

In this world, in a city of seven million inhabitants, the inhabitants experienced the Taste at the same instant.

A woman named Liahra was walking her dog along a riverbank. The dog had been her companion for nine years.

She loved this dog from the moment she had him as a pup, and now that the dog was old and walked slowly, she walked slowly with him.

Liahra had been walking slowly with him this way for the last two years, and she had been preparing herself for the year ahead in which she would have to lose him.

On this morning, the river was beautiful, and the light was the particular gold of autumn light on water, and she had been thinking about how few mornings like this one she would have left with him.

Without any warning, the Taste reached her.

Her hand, which was holding the leash, did not let go, and her fingers began to tighten on the leash, even though she was trying to stop, and at first, she thought she was having one of these rare condition called a stroke.

Liahra’s other hand reached down toward the dog’s collar, and she did not feel that she had asked the hand to do this either. The hand took hold of the collar and began to twist.

The dog made a sound, and Liahra felt her hand twist further. She felt her fingers grip the collar tighter, holding with a grip she would not have been able to produce if she had been trying.

Her dog was looking at her with eyes that were confused, and if the dog could, it would be begging her to stop, and Liahra tried to stop as her shock and horror kept growing, but she could not.

She watched her hand continue to tighten the collar past the point where the dog could breathe, and saw the dog’s confusion become panic, and the panic become the specific small terrible loneliness of an animal who does not understand why its person is doing this.

Liahra wanted to scream and weep, but she felt her face arrange itself into a pleasant smile, the smile she had used on the dog for nine years to indicate that everything was fine, and she watched the dog see the smile, and in the last seconds of being able to see, take comfort from the smile because the dog had been trained for nine years to take comfort from the smile.

She felt herself smile wider, and the dog died at the end of her hand, looking up at her face with the small, dim residual trust of an animal who believes its person until the last moment.

Her hand released the collar and picked up the dog’s body. She carried it to the river and let it drop while she watched it being carried away.

Liahra’s face throughout maintained the smile, while her mind was inside the smile, screaming, but she could not change the shape of the mouth that was making the smile.

Her body turned, calmly, and began to walk back along the riverbank toward the city, smiling.

She walked for a long time.