The Primordial Record novel Chapter 2217

Chapter 2217: The Start of The Grand Game

The first move had been the laugh of a farmer in a field, and the second move was the silence that followed it.

This is how the game began.

Eos knew that this would be the greatest challenge of his life, but like with all the challenges he would face them without holding back.

As a tenth-dimensional being, he was able to see the future, but because he was against the Painter, that future was blocked whenever the touch of the Painter came near it.

His presence also did the same for the Painter, and it would not be able to manipulate the Origin Tree as it saw fit, and it would only win if its strategy was the best.

Although Eos could not see the future, he could still see the general shape of it, and he knew that this conflict would not end for a span of time that no surviving being would ever be able to describe accurately, and even those who survived to its end would never agree on how long it had taken, because they had lived through different shapes of it.

There would be accounts, and there would, in fact, be civilisations whose entire scholarly tradition would be devoted to the reconstruction of the period now beginning, and these civilisations would be born and would mature and would fall and would be replaced by others who would also devote themselves to the reconstruction of it, and not one of these traditions would ever produce a complete chronology, because no chronology could hold what was about to happen.

What was about to happen was that two beings of the tenth dimension would, across the substrate of a Grand Void that was now the only theatre for the only remaining match, try to reshape Existence itself into the shape that suited them best.

One would do it with the intention of giving life free will and the chance to reach for Telos, and the other saw all life as pieces on a board for its endless amusement, and what amused this being was suffering.

Every life caught between them could opt out of this game, because the rules of the game made every life a piece; every life would, in some way, might never become aware of the fact that they were in a grand game between two beings.

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This game was divided into multiple stages, and each stage was an age. From the moment the Painter released Erosion and Eos sent joy into the Origin Realms, the first age began.

In the first age, which lasted somewhere between four hundred billion and six hundred billion Cosmic Era, depending on whose chronology you consulted, Eos did what he had said he would do.

He filled the Grand Void with small joys. His essence reaching across all things, no matter how far or how many they were, he was there... Eos had truly gained omnipotence and omniscience.

Eos simply began, in the quiet way that had been his nature since the bloom of the farmer in the seven-hour world, to nudge the inhabitants of his Tree into ordinariness, into the small unreasoned moments of being glad to be alive that had been the rarest commodity in the previous Existences and was about to become, in this one, the abundant one.

A child in a world on the seventeenth branch of the Origin Tree pulled a stone out of a stream and decided, for no reason, that the stone was beautiful. She kept it and did not show anyone.

The keeping became a habit, and the habit became a temperament. The temperament passed, after she died, into the descendants who had lived in the same valley and had absorbed her quiet presence the way a room absorbs the smell of bread.

The Painter never learned what had started it, because the starting was a stone in a stream a thousand generations earlier, and the stone in the stream had been a nudge that lasted no longer than a heartbeat. 𝒇𝓻𝓮𝓮𝙬𝙚𝒃𝒏𝓸𝙫𝒆𝙡.𝓬𝓸𝒎

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