The Primordial Record

The light from Andar’s transformation spread across the tiers of the audience, and the audience could not taste it.

The audience tried with every mouth that had grown along their lengths over millions of Existences, with the multiplied appetites that the Painter had refined into the only language the audience knew.

The audience reached for the light with the same hunger it had reached for every flavor the Painter had ever served, and the light did not enter their mouths, because the light was a presence, and presence was not in the vocabulary of hunger.

Not being able to taste something delectable in front of them was a torture that this audience had not experienced before, and they hated it.

The audience had been hungry for millions of Existences, but the hunger had always been resolvable, as the Painter had always served the next flavor without fail.

Screams that would drive Primordials mad emerged from them as the audience went mad with hunger.

Once they had been awakened in the face of the Painter, the audience could not stop eating.

With the provocation from this light, they could not touch; multiple mouths began to emerge from their bodies without counting.

All of these mouths reached out and bit into anything that was in reach, and the only thing in reach was the Painter.

And in their madness, they began attacking the Painter with even more force.

They were rabid, and every mouth on every audience member opened at once, with the desperation that comes from being given a presence that cannot be eaten and being unable to do anything but try harder, causing them to tear into the Painter’s body.

The screams of the Painter were haunting.

It had been screaming for some time, since the moment the audience first began eating it, but the screaming had been the screaming of pain.

This new screaming was the screaming of pain intensified. The audience was eating to resolve the unresolvable. The audience was eating with the ferocity that comes from being shown a substance one cannot consume.

Its body was being eaten faster. The amphitheater itself, the grafted substrate of the tiers, was being torn apart by the audience members in the tiers, and the audience members were biting into themselves as they bit, because the grafting meant the audience and the Painter shared substance, and the substance was being chewed without regard for which part of the substance was Painter and which part was audience.

The amphitheater was eating itself faster, and the Painter looked around in desperation. No one here could hurt it, but itself, and Eos had found a way to weaponise the Painter’s weakness, and its omniscience rippled through the room, and he understood that the source of the acceleration of its suffering was the light.

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The Painter had been pressing Eos, tearing, and breaking his body, and even in this moment, it did not stop pressing Eos, and it could not stop pressing Eos, because stopping would be a kind of surrender, and the Painter was psychologically incapable of surrender.

There was an insect on a small planet that would continue swallowing its prey even when it was being cut in two and sliced apart... This was the Painter.

However, it was an eleventh-dimensional being, and that meant that even in its state, it could add to itself.

The Painter sprouted new hands; these limbs sprouted from points on the Painter’s body where there was still some substance the audience had not yet bitten through. The new hands sprouted in numbers the Painter had never produced before, even in the moment of full unveiling, because the Painter had never been required to attack two beings simultaneously while being eaten alive.

Those hands reached for Andar, who was standing beside Eos in the light of his own becoming, with the wooden bird over his heart and the Black Tower shadow protecting him from the original attack.

The original attack, which was the single hand that had reached for him after the Painter’s first attack had been dissolved by the light, but the Painter was attacking with a massive number of hands.

With a sound that could shake the Grand Void, the Black Tower shadow held against the first dozen hands, and the first hundred, then the first thousand.

Then the thousands of hands began to compound, and the Black Tower shadow began to give with a loud crack.

It may be a replica of the Eternal Tower, and its material was built from the substrate of the tenth dimension, but it was not a material that could withstand the might of the Painter.

The Painter’s hands began to reach Andar’s body through the cracks, and the pressure on Andar began to multiply.

"Child, you will die, my audience shall consume you for an eternity upon eternity, until the very knowledge of time is meaningless."

This pressure was supposed to kill Andar... but it was doing something else.

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Eos, bleeding into the substrate, watched the Painter’s hands reach his son.

His attention was distributed across many things: the Origin Tree and his children all across it, Prime, in the past, and Serathis in the present, across the audience’s rabid attack on the Painter, across the cascade of consumption he had begun and could not let stop.

But part of his attention was on Andar, because he was the second tenth-dimensional being Eos had been working to make for an entire age, and Andar was now at the moment of the work.

Eos had bled deliberately.

The bleeding had not been a passive consequence of the Painter’s pressure. He had chosen to express his anguish in this manner because he was well aware that the Painter knew of his unbreakable connection with his mortal side.

However, this bleeding was a trap, and every drop of Eos’s tenth-dimensional blood that had fallen had fallen onto a specific portion of Serathis’s substrate, in a specific pattern, in the rough shape of a circle around where Eos had been standing.

The circle had been the place Andar would stand when Andar arrived, because Eos had known Andar would arrive and had been planning Andar’s arrival even before he sat before the board and began this game with the Painter.

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