Chapter 2218: Seventy Three Endings

As much as Eos wanted to stop this power from entering Existence, he could not; it was the rule of the game, and without it, the situation for all life would become bleak.

Just because Eos and the Painter were playing this game did not mean they could not physically fight each other, but there was a saying in one of the mortal worlds deep inside the Origin Tree, which goes, “When two elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers.”

The only way to fight the Painter was via this board, and that meant he had to follow the rules and counter the moves of the Painter with his own.

And Eos would respond to each of them.

The Painter did not move against the composer. The Painter moved against the tradition her piece founded. Three centuries later, the techniques she had pioneered were taught to children. Five centuries later, they were a school. Eight centuries later, they were the only school. Ten centuries later, they were the wallpaper of taste, and the original piece, the one that had once made strangers weep in alleys, could no longer be heard freshly by anyone in that world, because the structures of its expectation had been so completely flattened by Repetition that what had once been an arrival was now simply a place.

Gods forgot their worshippers and kings forgot their subjects, and across countless dimensions, Drift and Distance wreaked havoc.

This was just in philosophers, and not the other countless lives that filled the Origin Tree, both mortal and immortal.

The Painter had learned its lesson well, and its counterattack was fierce.

A father in a world on the four-quintillion branch found, over the course of his middle years, that he was not as close to his son as he had once been.

Eos saw it happening and could not stop it. Repetition was inside time itself, and time was a fourth-dimensional matter, and even the tenth dimension could not retrieve a first hearing once it had been worn smooth.

They knew the war had ended and Enoch was dead alongside the Ancient Primordials. They knew Eos had ascended past their reach into something they could no longer fully perceive, and Existence was now the Origin Tree which was endlessly vast and growing, and that new Realities that were the size of the previous Existence bloomed on its branches faster than any Primordial could count, and that life in those worlds seemed, by every measurable index, better than life had ever been before.

Mortality rates fell. Wars ended sooner. Diseases that should have ravaged whole regions petered out for reasons no one could identify. Marriages held. Children survived their childhoods at rates that, in the previous Existence, would have been considered miraculous.

Drift was just the beginning, and what came next was Distance, the companion of Drift.

And so he could only watch the influence of Drift enter his Origin Tree.

Distance was a habit which the Painter taught to entire civilizations without their knowing. Distance worked on the architecture of relationships.

There was less hunger, less cruelty, less of the particular kind of avoidable suffering that the previous Existence had specialized in producing.

Drift’s whole purpose was to make beings smaller without their noticing, and across the first age, Drift would touch sixteen trillion philosophers, and all of them would write less than they would have, and none of them would know why.

If he were to battle the Painter, then the entirety of the Grand Void would become a place of devastation, and the Origin Tree would survive it, but all of its inhabitants would be dead, even the Primordials.

The Primordials of the new Existence, those born in the new Tree, and those who had survived the old war and become its first elders, did not, on the whole, understand what was happening.

By the third generation, the entire culture in that part of the world had developed an aesthetic of reserve, and the aesthetic of reserve had begun to seal off precisely the kind of private joy that Eos had been quietly cultivating.

He could not point to the moment of cooling. There had been no fight. There had been no betrayal. There had simply been, over the slow accumulation of two thousand small choices, a way in which the father had stopped reaching.

Repetition worked by allowing a thing to happen twice. Then three times. Then, with horrible patience, again and again until the thing, which had been beautiful the first time, radically beautiful, new the way only new things were new, became expected.

The son had felt it, and he had slowly gotten used to such treatments from his father. The son’s children had been raised in a household where reaching was already considered slightly embarrassing.

She lost her followers and lost her appetite for argument. She became smaller, shrinking away from the things that she loved.
𝐟𝑟𝙚𝚎𝙬𝚎𝙗𝑛𝑜𝒗ℯ𝐥.𝔠𝕠𝔪

Observing how well the first two were doing, the Painter released Repetition, which was the deadliest of the new family, and which the Painter held back the longest.

Distance was the Painter’s answer to the silting of joy, and Distance moved across worlds in the first age the way a frost moves across a continent.

A great composer in a world on the sixty-third branch wrote, in her youth, a piece of music so profound that those who heard it wept for a week afterward.

Across the first age of the long move, the Painter would deploy seventy-three of these tools, of which the above were among the gentlest.

A philosopher in a world on the second branch began, under Drift’s quiet pressure, to find that her old certainties no longer felt certain, not because she had been refuted, but because the tone of certainty had shifted in her.

This was Eos’s quiet joy. Most of the Primordials never knew it for what it was; only a few did.
𝕗𝕣𝑒𝐞𝓌𝖊𝙗𝚗𝙤𝔳𝑒𝔩.𝐜𝗈𝘮

Eva, who had ascended into the fifth layer of her Origin in the moment Eos’s soul reached the Origin Realms, came in time to perceive what was happening, because the fifth layer of her Origin was the dimension of Revelation, and Eos’s joy was, at its essence, a flood of small interior brightnesses.