Chapter 2236: Unrelenting Madness |
The new painting was, again, extraordinary. The subjects were his wife and his daughter. His hand worked for four hours, and when the new painting was finished, he cut it into pieces and burned them.
This continued for the rest of the day and through the night, and then for the next nine days.
His body did not require sleep during the Taste; the Painter had built the Taste to suspend the body’s normal operations except where its normal operations served the suffering.
Veyris’s wife came to the studio on the second day to bring him food. He smiled at her and asked her to leave him to his work, while declining the food with warmth and assurance that he did not need it.
Amazed at the quality of his work, the confused wife walked away, thinking he must be snacking on his hidden stash of cookies that he was not aware that she knew about.
On the fourth day, she returned with their daughter, and Veyris smiled and sent them both away while he continued to paint and burn.
Soon, the fireplace was filled with ash.
On the tenth day, his hand laid down the brush, walked him out of the studio, and went to find his wife and daughter.
He saw them in the kitchen, in the morning, in the eastern light, exactly the composition he had been painting for ten days.
Unlike Liahra, who was infinitely far in another world, Veyris had long gone mad, and he was able to understand what the taste wanted him to do... it was to create the perfect art that could not be captured on a painting.
His hands opened the small kitchen drawer that contained the knives, and he went to work on his family.
When he was finished, Veris stood in the kitchen for a long time looking at what he had made. After a while, he picked up the brush from the studio, and he began, on the wall above the bodies, to paint.
The painting on the wall, when it was finished, was the same composition he had been painting for ten days, but better than any of the ten days had been.
It was the best painting he had ever made. It was the best painting he would ever make. It was a masterwork.
His hand laid down the brush, and Veyris took a chair in the kitchen and sat himself down on it, and faced toward the painting and the bodies.
The Taste, on Veris, was complete.
Veris remained in the chair, and the Taste did not let him sleep. The Taste did not let him close his eyes.
He sat in the chair and looked at the painting and the bodies. The morning passed, the afternoon passed, the evening passed, and the night came, and the next morning came, and he was still in the chair.
The Taste held him there for as long as the Painter had specified, which was the rest of his life.
He lived for forty more years in that chair.
Yet his madness only lasted for three months, and until he died, Veyris was screaming inside his head.
This madness was happening across the Tree.
The specifics varied. The Taste was a connoisseur’s piece, and a connoisseur’s piece does not repeat.
Each life it reached was given a particular variation suited to that life’s loves, skills, and patterns.
A musician’s hands made his last symphony for him while he listened, and the symphony was the best he would ever write, and his hands then broke every instrument in the conservatory before they broke his hands.
A surgeon’s hands operated, with brilliance, on her son, and when she was done, all his internal organs had been exchanged with those of a goat.
A poet’s mouth recited, in the poet’s own voice, a poem the poet had not written and did not know he was capable of writing.
The poem was perfect, but it was about the poet’s mother, and at the end of the poem, the poet told his mother what the poet had always thought of her in the worst hours of his honesty.
He had always loved his mother more than how a son should love their mother, and yet the things he said were true, and the mother heard that truth, and it broke her heart.
She died of a heart attack not long after, and the poet took his mother’s corpse into the house, and he satisfied himself until he went mad with grief, but he could not stop, not even when the corpse of his mother had decayed to nothing but pulped flesh and broken bones.
A grandmother fed her grandchildren a meal she had not chosen to cook. The meal was excellent, and the grandchildren ate it with great appetite, but the meal was poisoned, and this woman, who loved these children more than life itself, watched them die agonizing deaths that the Taste made sure to stretch for months.
A doctor, in his office, opened his door to his next patient with a warm smile. The patient was his oldest friend. The smile remained warm throughout, even as this doctor slowly cut the screaming patient to pieces over weeks, ensuring he did everything possible to keep the patient alive.
A teacher, in a room of twenty children, picked up the chalk and began to instruct his wards on the best ways to commit suicide.
A priest, at the altar, raised the cup and began to curse his god.
The variations were endless, and the audience appreciated the variations. The Painter was a connoisseur, and the Painter delivered.
It happened on world after world, in universe after universe, on branch after branch, at the scale the Tree was, which is to say at a scale that did not resolve to numbers and did not need to, because the audience did not require enumeration to enjoy what was happening; the audience required the simultaneous presence of many sufferings and this was being delivered to them in spades.
And yet there was the knowledge that this was just the beginning.
Eos had built a spectacularly powerful Existence that was beyond what most Existence could become, and such an Existence could feed them for countless ages to come.
The Taste was just the first of many that were to come.
