The Primordial Record novel Chapter 2214

Chapter 2214: The First Existence

"What did you just do?" Eos said. He kept his voice level, even though this was the last thing he wanted to do.

"I moved a piece," the Painter said. "The piece I moved is a very old one. It is called Erosion. It was my first employee. It has been asleep since I no longer needed it, but it remembers its work. I have set it as a small task. A slow task. Your outermost worlds, the youngest ones, the ones just bloomed this hour, Erosion will begin, from the seam I just opened, the quiet work of making them forget they were ever meant for anything. They will not die, but they will simply stop reaching for you. They would stop yearning for Telos, becoming lazy and decadent. In about an era of your time, they will be smooth, unshaped." The hand of the Painter shifted, and Eos thought that this almost resembled a smile, "They would be beautiful, in a way. Finished."

"That is my piece you are moving against."

"That is your piece I am moving against. Yes. And it is your turn."

Eos looked at the board.

He looked at the seam, at the quiet frequency leaking from it, at the outermost worlds of the Origin Tree shivering under a pressure that most of their inhabitants could not yet feel.

He looked at the Painter.

"And when I move," he said, "I move against your pieces."

"Yes."

"Which are?"

The Painter settled back in its chair.

"Whatever you can find," it said amiably. "Whatever is mine. The habits of End that persist in the substrate. The ideologies I have seeded in dead Existences that still whisper in the bones of the Grand Void. The small, quiet loyalties of things that have served me for so long that they cannot imagine serving anything else. There are many. You will discover them as you play. I will not make a list. It would spoil the art."

"Art."

"The game is an art," the Painter said, with the calm of a man stating an obvious professional fact. "It is the oldest art. Older than creation, actually, because you cannot create without first having defined what it would mean to lose what you created, and loss is an aesthetic decision. I was an artist before I was a creator. I remain one."

Eos was silent.

Then he said, quietly: "Tell me about the first Existence. Origin believes it remembers it, but I know that something is missing. In my memories, there are not forty-three pieces missing, there are forty-four."

The Painter went still. It was not a long stillness. A breath, no more. But it was stillness, and Eos had been watching for it, and he watched it pass through the shrouded form the way a ripple passes through dark water.

"Why do you want to know that?" the Painter said. The pleasantness was, for the first time, slightly thinner.

"Because every other thing I have fought in this war has traced its shape, somewhere, to the first Existence," Eos said. "Because Enoch carried it. Because I suspect everything that led to something like you existing was born from the shattering that happened in it. Because I believe that whatever you are afraid of sits inside that memory. And because if I am going to play this game with you, I would prefer to do it with the piece of information you have never allowed any of the forty-three to have."

"They asked," the Painter said, after a moment.

"Did they?"

"You are not the only perceptive one, Eos... Each of them found traces of this, eventually. I told each of them a story. Different stories. I am good at stories. Although they only know how to ask after they have been defeated, and you are the first to ask before the game begins."

"Which story are you going to tell me?"

"Before the first Existence, there was no void. There was no dark. There was no nothing, because nothing is still a kind of space, and there was not even space. There was only attention... a single sustained attention, without direction, without object. I was that attention, although I was not called anything then, because there was nothing to call me and no one to call me it. I simply noticed. For what you would call an eternity, I noticed, and the noticing was the whole of what there was."

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