The Primordial Record

Andar entered the Tower, and he found out that the Eternal Tower’s interior was not a space. It was a substrate, which was a medium where the thickness of dimension had no equivalent in the Origin Tree.

It was then that he realized what this Eternal Tower was built from, and there was an urge to throw up, because he realized he was walking inside the fused bodies of many tenth-dimensional beings.

Andar moved through the Tower as he began to discover something else from its shape, realizing that the tower was a near copy of the Black Tower that he had built, using the borrowed knowledge of the substrate that was being funneled towards all these while.

Or rather, he should say that his Black Tower was a miniature of the Eternal Tower. This led him to understand a brief glimpse of his father’s overall plan.

He shook his head in astonishment. Only his father could do something like this, even in this dimension, he was still infallible.

Andar could feel his father above him. He could feel the Painter’s rage, the audience’s hunger, the tears that had fallen and been eaten, the grief that was still rising from the Tree’s roots. He could feel the blood pooling at his father’s feet.

His father needed him, and so he moved faster.

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In the time-layers of the Eternal Tower’s past, Chronomancer Prime felt the shift.

The Painter’s attention had not returned to the perimeter and was still on Eos, leaving Prime in the darkness of the past where he had been working for all these Cosmic Eras, unwinding decisions that had been made before the concept of decision had a name.

Slowly but surely, he was approaching the core of the Eternal Tower, where he would find the final decision, or was it the first decision?

It was not a decision the Painter had made deliberately, but one were it had become. The graft between the Painter and the audience was the Painter’s oldest architecture, and the architecture had become the Painter’s nature.

Prime could not unwind a nature. He could only undo a decision. The decision had to be found, and only then could he call the attention of his father.

So, Prime continued to dig deeper into the past.

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In the Tower’s substrate, Serathis ate faster.

She had been able to open the door for her brother, and now he was inside the Eternal Tower.

The substrate was shifting, and yet the Painter’s attention was still elsewhere. Serathis shuddered when she thought about the price her father must be paying for this to happen.

This was the moment she had been preparing for, and the preparation had taken a Cosmic Era, and now that Cosmic Era was ending.

Praying for the appetites of the Origin Ouroboros, she continued to eat.

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At the peak of the Eternal Tower, the Painter’s hands continued to tear at Eos.

Eos’s body was bleeding into the substrate. His blood was changing the substrate where it fell, but the change was slow, and the Painter did not notice because all of its attention was on Eos’s refusal.

Under the pain of being consumed by the audience, the thin skin of sanity that the Painter had was being rapidly erased, leaving the core of madness beneath to shine through.

"You are dying," the Painter finally whispered, bringing up some of its arms and looking at the divine blood that had caked it.

"I am bleeding," Eos smiled. "There is a difference."

"Your blood leaving your body is the same as your substance leaving your being. You will become nothing but a silent block on my Eternal Tower."

"I will become something else. There is grace and nobility in change, I thought your tears should have shown you this truth."

The Painter’s hands tightened. Eos’s bones cracked, and the sound of the cracking was the sound of a tenth-dimensional being’s structure giving way under an eleventh-dimensional pressure.

Eos did not scream. He had not screamed in any age, and he would not begin now.

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Andar felt his father’s bones crack and the impossible wave of pain radiating from his position.

He was not yet at the peak of the Tower and was still moving through the Tower’s substrate. The substrate was thick, and the distance was not spatial, but the cracking was transmitted through the connection between father and son that predated both their ascensions.

He moved faster, and the wooden bird over his heart was no longer warm, becoming hot, hotter than it had ever been, and the heat was spreading through the substance of his proto-tenth-dimensional being.

The heat was a direction, and he followed it, knowing that it would bring him closer to his father.

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In the tiers, the audience continued to eat. The tearing of the Painter’s hands had torn pieces of the audience off the Painter’s body, and the pieces were now separate from the Painter, and the separate pieces were still eating. They ate the substrate beneath them.

The substrate was not a thing that could be eaten, but the audience ate it anyway, and they soon began to encounter the light from Serathis, hidden in the substrate of the Tower.

This new portion of the Tower confused the audience, and the Painter felt the audience’s confusion through the torn pieces of its body, the pieces that were still attached and eating everything.

This confusion was a new flavor that distracted the Painter, and he hated it.

"Stop," the Painter screamed, but the audience had been unleashed, and they could no longer be controlled.

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Andar reached the top of the Eternal Tower, but he could not find a door to enter the place where the Painter and Eos had been playing the game for two ages.

He did not need a door when he could enter through the substrate, and he followed it.

He emerged from the floor of the room, where the substrate had been thinning for a thousand years. These thinning were both from Serathis and from the blood of Eos that had been eating through the substrate of the Eternal Tower.

He emerged to see the madness at the top of the Tower.

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