The Primordial Record novel Chapter 2224

Chapter 2224: Eyes Wide Shut

Eos saw it as a mistake for what it was, but he did not make any indication that he was aware of it. The Painter, on reflection a hundred Cosmic Eras later, saw it as a mistake also, but it was a mistake the Painter could not undo without revealing it had been a mistake. So the Cancellation widened, and a piece that had been precise was now slightly less precise, and a piece slightly less precise was a piece slightly more vulnerable, and Eos filed this and did not move on it for another forty million Cosmic Eras.

He moved at last in the four hundred and seventy-one billionth Cosmic Era, on a world the Painter was not watching closely.

The world had been chosen for him, though he did not know it had been chosen for him.

Vraegar’s chamber was sealed, and the small white-haired child within had not been visible to Eos for a long time, because Eos had decided not to look, and because Vraegar had decided not to be looked at.

But the chamber was not perfectly sealed against the substrate of the new Existence, and the small white-haired child had been learning the rhythms of the long move, and the small white-haired child had begun, very quietly, to have effects.

The child Rowan was in the board, and yet he was not, because he was not observed, and that was important because it meant that the Painter could not see him.

The effects that the child began to make were on which worlds were calm enough, in any given hundred billion Cosmic Era stretch, that Eos’s attention naturally drifted toward them. The small white-haired child, by the small, slow modeling he was doing in his chamber, was producing a faint pattern in the substrate that nudged calm worlds into Eos’s peripheral awareness at a slightly higher rate than chance would have produced.

Eos did not know this was happening. The Painter did not know this was happening. The small white-haired child also did not know exactly that this was happening, because he was only modeling, and the modeling had effects he had not yet noticed.

So when Eos, at the four hundred and seventy-one billionth Cosmic Era, looked at a particular calm world on a small branch of the Tree and decided, with a feeling he interpreted as instinct, that this was where he would make his second move of the second age, he was wrong about why he had chosen the world. He thought he had chosen it; however, the truth was that he had been chosen to.

This was the shape of the third player entering the game without entering the game. 𝙛𝓻𝒆𝒆𝒘𝙚𝓫𝙣𝙤𝒗𝙚𝓵.𝙘𝙤𝙢

Something like this had happened in the distant past between Eos and his Incarnation on the Doom Star. Berrion the Undying was making moves that Rowan did not know about, but somehow, they were able to work together without even making an overall plan.

The same thing was happening here, but on a much vaster scale, and this was the only manner that Eos had designed to cheat the board.

If he observed something, then the Painter would know about it, and so any move he made would be countered, but what if he was making moves that he was not aware of, but those moves still served him?

They were already losing the language for who watches. The Cancellation had reached them eight hundred Cosmic Eras ago and was steadily smoothing.

She would not ask who watches. The Cancellation had taken that question from her and from her people two centuries before she was born. But she would feel, faintly, that something was not where it should be, and over the following thirty years she would, in a thousand small unconscious ways, look. She would look at the sky a little more often. She would look at the corners of rooms. She would, when meeting strangers, study their faces a fraction of a second longer than her neighbors did.

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