The Primordial Record novel Chapter 2230

Chapter 2230: Levels Above And Levels Below

Eos had now placed two pieces below the Painter’s resolution that interfered with each other in a productive way.

Even though it did not seem like much, he had begun his counterattack.

He began, while attending to his other work, to consider what a third such piece would look like.

Eos did not consider it long before he set the consideration aside. The third piece would come when the third piece came. The long move was not in a hurry, and if he decided to push too quickly, he might lose the positions that he had gained.

Too many hands spoil the broth.

The Painter, finally, returned its full attention to the propagation of deceit it had unleashed upon Existence, and after all this time, it had not stopped, and the infected branches were still propagating its poison.

The Cancellation was still working at its task, and the Painter had now, by lifting and not placing the Erasure, given Eos forty thousand Cosmic Eras of additional propagation time, and this propagation had reached one hundred and twelve branches.

What this entire battle was focused on was simple. Eos had shaken the game by making mortals, and everyone became aware of a presence outside Existence that was watching them, but the Painter would never want something like this to happen.

And so from that point forward, every move made by the Painter was to erase that decision that Eos had made, and Eos was fighting to preserve that decision.

The battle of the second age would be about this, and it was unknown who would come out ahead.

The Painter considered its options, and it saw that a direct counter to the propagation was not available. The Cancellation could not be closed, and The Erasure had been declined and could not be lifted again without revealing further intelligence.

It had other reserved pieces, but using a reserved piece on a propagation that was not yet a doctrinal threat would be a poor use of reserves.

After contemplating for a while, the Painter chose to work at the level Eos was working at. The Painter would seed its own pieces below its own resolution.

This was a choice with a cost. Pieces below the Painter’s resolution were pieces the Painter could not directly observe. The Painter would have to operate, in some portion of the game, at a level where the Painter’s observation of its own moves was imperfect.

This was uncomfortable for it as the Painter had, for endless cycles and millions of total Existences, played the game from above. To play from below required a different posture.

However, the Painter was slowly adapting, and it soon adopted the posture.

It made, on a branch unrelated to the propagation, a small move involving the introduction of a particular grammatical construction into the legal language of a confederation of city-states.

The construction was a passive voice with no implied agent. It permitted sentences in which something happened without anyone having done it. The Painter introduced the construction so casually, at such a low resolution, that the construction took root in the legal language and from there spread to the literary language and from there to common speech, and within a Cosmic Era, the inhabitants of the affected branch were habitually speaking in a grammar where things happened without doers.

The grammar would, over Cosmic Eras, slightly attenuate the inhabitants’ capacity to feel that something is being done to them.

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