The Primordial Record novel Chapter 2232

Chapter 2232: Surely You Must Have Felt It

The Painter gestured, but it was not at the audience in its face but at Eos himself.

"Tell me," the Painter said. "What are you made of?"

Eos did not answer the question because something told him that the Painter would not even want him to answer, as it was glorying in this moment. This being knew that it had thrown Eos off his game, and there was no way that it would not take advantage of this.

"You are made of Telos," the Painter said. Then it whispered, "Purpose. The end a thing is for. The medium of the tenth dimension. You believe Telos to be yours because you fused it from Origin and Truth at the top of the Eternal Tower, reorganized your being around it, and grew an Origin Tree out of it. Yes?"

Again, Eos did not answer because it did not feel like the Painter was asking him a question, only ensuring that Eos was following every word it was saying.

"Telos is not yours," the Painter said with a finality that shook the space around them. "Telos was never yours. Telos was not even the previous tenth-dimensional being that stood before this table. What was her name? Ah, yes, Elura. Do you like what I did there? I used a piece of a defeated tenth-dimensional being to birth a new one. I made you Eos, and the one before... and the one before."

There was silence as countless beings in the face of the Painter looked at Eos, as if waiting for any single bit of emotion he would let out so that they could feed. The feeling of having quadrillions upon countless quadrillions of hungry eyes staring at you was something that was hard for an immortal mind to fathom.

"Telos has been mine for so long that the word mine loses precision when applied to the relationship. Telos is the medium I have been working in since long before Origin existed. Origin is a recent invention. A clever child’s improvisation. A faculty that came into being inside a substance I was already shaping. Your Origin sees what is real; what is real, in the tenth dimension, is what I have permitted to be real. Your Truth sees what is true; what is true, in the tenth dimension, is what I have not yet erased. Your sight is bounded by faculties that were born inside my medium and cannot perceive the medium itself, because perceiving the medium would require a faculty that predates Origin, and you have no such faculty."

"You will object that I am lying," the Painter said. "You will object that this is the Painter’s voice trying to demoralize you before the meal. Test the claim. Examine your Tree. Examine the texture of your own being. You will find that you cannot examine the medium of your being, because the medium is what you examine with. You can use Origin to look at things. You cannot use Origin to look at Origin. You cannot use Truth to look at Truth. You cannot use Telos to look at Telos. The faculties that perceive cannot perceive the substance they are made of. This is a structural fact about how perception works, and I built it. I built perception this way deliberately, across millions of Existences, by making sure that whatever faculty a tenth-dimensional being developed for seeing, the seeing would always rest on a substrate it could not turn its eye onto. The blind spot is not a flaw in your sight. The blind spot is the architecture I painted you with."

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