The Primordial Record novel Chapter 2212

Chapter 2212: Tell Me The Rules

Eos appeared inside a small room. 𝐟𝐫𝕖𝗲𝘄𝚎𝗯𝕟𝐨𝕧𝐞𝚕.𝕔𝕠𝐦

He had anticipated that the being at the top of the Tower would not announce itself with scale, that it would, as all the truly terrible things did, the ones who had graduated beyond theater, meet him in something domestic.

It was perhaps a reflection of the body that he chose to wear as he entered this tower, and he knew that this room was the Painter’s reply to this.

However, he could see that this room was not a study or an office; it could be seen as a butcher’s back office.

Why would he call it this? Well, it was small, practical, and it was tiled in something dark and smooth that sloped very slightly toward a drain in the corner.

The tiles had been scrubbed, but not recently enough. There were hooks in one of the walls, iron, clean. There was a low counter against another wall with the scarred, deep-grooved surface of a working block.

Many beings had been butchered and taken apart here, most likely the forty-three before him.

Above was a fixed light, plain, the color of a bulb that had been left on for a long time and had grown tired of its own labor.

There was no warmth in the room, and there was no cruelty in the room either. The room was simply fitted out, with the correctness of long use, for the one purpose it had ever been used for.

Eos registered all of this in a single breath, and he did not permit himself any reaction.

In the center of the room was a table, and on the table was a board.

Behind the table was a chair, and in the chair was the Painter.

It sat with the relaxed economy of a craftsman at the end of a long day. It wore a body, and Eos knew that the Painter took a body because the game was played better between seated figures.

The body was shrouded, as the voice had been shrouded in its first address, and this was all a carefully made decision. The Painter had simply decided, a very long time ago, that it would not be perceived, and perception, at the tenth dimension, was something that could be refused the way a signature could be refused on a document.

Eos saw the seated shape, but did not see the Painter.

"Come in, come in," the Painter said.

Now that he could truly hear its voice, Eos could feel its wrongness brushing across his entire being.

Eos had expected the voice to be old, and it was old.

He had expected it to be tired, and this had been his own projection, his own wishful translation of what a being at this level ought to be after so long, but it was not tired at all.

The voice was brisk, almost amused, like the voice of a working man who enjoyed his work.

"Sit down. Please. You walked the whole way; you must want to sit."

Eos glanced at the shrouded figure, and he sat.

The chair fit him because it had been made for him. Not for someone his size in general, but for him specifically; the lumbar curve knew his spine, and the height of the seat matched his legs, and the armrests were at the height his elbows would naturally fall to.

The board was a cross-section of the Grand Void, rendered at an impossible scale, and what made it extremely different from the map he had made while a lower-dimensional being was that it was not a representation of the Grand Void; it was the Grand Void, viewed from a particular angle.

VERIFYCAPTCHA_LABELVerify