Chapter 2235: The Painter |
The Taste did not release Liahra, even after she had just brutally killed her dog.
There was no moment of reprieve; there could never be any moment of rest as long as the Taste had taken hold of a person.
She wanted to collapse and weep and return back to the woman that she was earlier before this nightmare began, but the Taste had taken hold of her, and her body was no longer her own, only her mind was left to be a witness.
Her body, walking, took her to her apartment, and her hands, in her apartment, took out the photographs of her mother, who had died eleven years ago, and which she kept on her dresser.
Slowly, as if relishing every moment, her hands burned the photographs in the kitchen sink, one by one, and her face throughout watched the photographs burn with the same pleasant smile.
These photographs were her most cherished possession; they were all the memories she had of her mother, and they were all gone.
Her body moved on, and Liahra found herself at her neighbor’s door, and as her hand knocked on the door, her face arranged itself into the warm and specific expression her neighbor was used to seeing.
The neighbor opened the door, a bit surprised at the knock at this time of the day, and she smiled back when she saw Liahra.
Inside Liahra’s head, she was screaming,
Her hand held the small kitchen knife she had not noticed picking up on her way out.
This hand gently placed the knife into Marsa’s stomach, and while doing so, her face throughout held a warm expression, and her voice kept speaking the small, ordinary words she would have said to Marsa on an ordinary morning
"Good morning, are you well? Is the baby sleeping?"
Marsa, who had been her friend for fourteen years, had time, in the seconds available, to register everything that was happening, and yet she could not understand... a part of her was hearing and seeing her neighbor speaking to her, and yet she was being repeatedly stabbed in the stomach at the same time.
"I don’t... I am... Liahra, please..."
Marsa died confused.
Liahra’s body went on into the apartment, smiling, speaking warm words, holding the knife, and Liahra’s mind went with the body because the mind had nowhere else to go.
"Hello, kids... your lovely neighbor is coming to give you a hug."
This was happening to seven million inhabitants of the city at the same time, and because the Taste wanted a different dimension to the suffering it could inflict, it gave half of the inhabitants of this city its curse and unleashed them on the other half.
It was happening to the inhabitants of the next city over, and the next, and the next, across the continent, across the world. It was happening on every world inside the universe Liahra’s world was a vessel for, and on every universe inside every dimension inside every dimensional cluster that made up the entirety of the ’world on the branch.’
To satisfy the audience in its face, the Taste was unleashed on a scale beyond anything the Painter had ever done in either of the two ages.
The Painter watched the choir of expression and was, in its calm, professional way, satisfied.
The audience member in the four hundred and seventeenth tier was satisfied.
Other audience members across the tiers found the specific notes that their tastes had been calibrated to enjoy, and they took from it.
It was then that Eos began to glimpse the true horror of what was to come if he failed to stop the Painter.
Inside its head, the members of the audience were infinite, and all of them had their own curse... no matter how large his Origin Tree was, how long could it survive under the relentless hunger of the audience, who all had their own cravings and wanted more.
How can his Origin Tree survive an infinite number of curses?
In a different world, in a different infinity, a man named Veris was an artist.
He had been a painter for forty years, and he had loved one woman for thirty of them, and they had a daughter together, and the daughter was six.
The Taste reached him at his easel. His hand, holding the brush, did not finish the stroke he was making; instead, his hand turned smoothly and applied the brush to the canvas in a different direction.
Veris watched the brush make a mark he had not chosen, and with curiosity and a bit of fright, he watched his hand load the brush with a different color, and make another mark.
He watched, over the next four hours, his hand produce a painting on the canvas in front of him.
The painting, when it was finished, was extraordinary.
It was the best painting Veris had ever made. He understood this as he watched it being made. His hand, working without him, produced a work that exceeded every painting he had labored over for forty years.
The composition was perfect. The light was perfect. The subject was perfect. The subject was his wife and his daughter, in the kitchen, in the morning, the way they had looked yesterday morning at breakfast, and the painting captured every quality of them he had ever loved, his wife’s particular tilt of the head, his daughter’s quickness, the light through the eastern window...
All of this was rendered with the precision Veris had spent forty years failing to achieve.
Veris’s hand set down the brush, and that same hand that had created this miracle picked up the small knife he kept on his palette for fine work and began to cut the painting into pieces.
His hand cut the painting into pieces small enough that no piece preserved a recognizable feature of either his wife or his daughter, and he collected the pieces, carried them to the fireplace, and burned them.
Veris’s mind, throughout, was at his easel, watching his hand do this.
After burning the painting, he returned to the easel and stretched a new canvas. His hand began another painting.
