The Primordial Record novel Chapter 2216

Chapter 2216: I Will Give Them Joy

A small frown slipped past Eos’s face before it disappeared.

"Then what am I?"

The Painter smiled. Eos could not see the smile, but the shrouded shape shifted in a way that suggested it, and said:

"You are the first piece I have been unable to watch without being watched back. Every one of the forty-four has done it in their way. Each one has looked up at me from the floor. Each one has met my attention with attention of their own. It is an extraordinary sensation. It is also, as you can perhaps understand, the thing I have spent every subsequent era of my existence trying to prevent from happening again. And yet here we are."

"So the game..."

"Is whether I can put you back on the floor," the Painter said, "or whether you can drag me out of the stands?"

It gestured at the board between them.

"Shall we?" it said. 𝚏𝕣𝕖𝚎𝚠𝚎𝚋𝚗𝐨𝐯𝕖𝕝.𝕔𝐨𝕞

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Eos looked at the board, and he did not look at the shrouded figure of the Painter again. He did not need to. He had, in the long telling of the first Existence, seen the shape of the thing he was playing against, and the shape was not what he had prepared for.

The thing was that Eos had prepared for grief and tyranny. He had expected to find the Painter to be a being broken by its own love of a thing it could not keep.

He had not prepared for the Painter to be an audience.

The audience was a worse opponent than a tyrant. A tyrant could be deposed. An audience could not.

An audience simply moved to another theater when its present one failed, and the theaters were Existences, and the Painter had been moving theaters for longer than memory, and the current theater, his Existence, the Origin Tree, and every life on every branch, was simply the most recent one.

The Painter did not want to destroy it. The Painter wanted to watch it.

Which would not be such a bad thing if what this being wanted to watch was mostly suffering.

The Painter had been watching his Existence from the first moment Eos took a breath in the body of a dying prince in a room full of bodies. Every loss Eos had suffered, every victory, every moment of grief or love or terror across a hundred million years, all of it had been spectacle, to the thing in the chair across from him... All of it had been rich content.

The game was not a war to this being; it was a performance. And Eos, if he wished to win, could not merely play well.

He would have to make the audience look away, just because he could not reach across and choke this audience to death.

Eos looked at the board, and then at the seam the Painter had opened, and he observed Erosion beginning its quiet work on the outermost worlds of the Tree, before turning and looking at his pieces.

And he found, very carefully, the piece that he believed the Painter did not yet fully understand.

Not Eva, Vraegar, Circe, or any of the brilliant choices that the Painter was already watching with the particular hunger of a spectator. Not Prime or Serathis or any of the obvious powers.

He found, on the board, the farmer.

The farmer was in a world that had bloomed seven hours ago, but in local time, this was seven million years, and he was standing in his field, holding a tool he had been given the evening before, beginning to understand what it was for.

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