Chapter 2258: The First Proto-Tenth-Dimensional Being

Andar had thought about this for a thousand years. His father had told him that there was always a price for power, and over the years, he had come to understand that price.

He had decided what to give up.

Every other thing in the cosmos was reshaping, recalibrating, expressing, eating, dying, being born. The wooden bird was a thing a son had carved with his own hands a long time ago. The wooden bird was still. The stillness was Andar’s anchor.

“You crossed,” she said, to the empty house.

“Then I would make every being inside your Origin Tree extinct!”

Andar was where she had been working alone for the entire second age.

The halfway-across point was the most dangerous moment. The halfway-across-point was the moment at which a being was neither fully in the previous dimension nor fully in the next, and any disturbance at the halfway-point could collapse the crossing, and the collapse would not return the being to the previous dimension; the collapse would erase the being entirely.

And Serathis, deep in the meat of the Tower, felt her father’s son arrive, her brother, and she resumed eating with greater speed, because the door he had stepped through was a door she had been preparing for him, and the door was the seam she had been weakening, and her brother was now inside the house.

He arrived at the base of the Eternal Tower for the first time in his existence.

She opened her eyes.

The third age was no longer being fought in three places.

The wooden bird, which had been over his heart since he left the house, which had been carved by a son who had died three Existences ago, became, in the halfway point, the only thing in the substrate of the cosmos that was not in motion.

He was different. His body had taken a form he did not recognize, a form composed of substances his eyes had not previously been able to perceive, but the form was still Andar in the sense that mattered; it was the being who loved a woman with everything. The form was the wrapping, but the substance inside was Andar.

Andar held the halfway point. He held it by holding the wooden bird.

Andar took that step as a proto-tenth-dimensional, and the step crossed more substrate than the previous thousand years of walking had crossed.

She ran her hand along the worn wood of the chair.

Some of the Tower’s substrate was Serathis’s. He felt his father’s signature beneath his hand, and the substrate, recognizing him, opened for him.

Mira sat down in the chair.

“Come back to me anyway,” she said. “Whatever shape you are.”

“No,” Eos said.

At the board, Eos stood with his blood pooling at his feet and the Painter’s hands still tearing at him.

She had been sitting in Andar’s chair with her eyes closed for a thousand years. She was a Primordial, and she could wait in the way only true immortals could wait, which was the way still water waits… this was a wait that was without measurement of duration.

A door appeared in the Tower’s substrate, and Andar stepped through.

The Andar who emerged would be a different shape, a different substance, a different being in the wrapping. He would remember the original. He would carry the memories. He would carry the wooden bird. But he would not be able to be the original again.

This was the step that every being in the ninth dimension would call infinity, because they would walk this adjacency of all eternity and they would not be able to cross it.

Andar emerged on the other side of the step, and he was the first proto-tenth-dimensional being to be born.

She also knew that the man who would return to her would not be the husband who had left. He would be Andar in the parts that mattered, but he would not be Andar in the form.

The house, which had been built by Andar’s hands from wood that had grown on a world that had died an Existence ago, creaked in response.

He had not told Mira because he knew that she would not accept it, and he would not be able to refuse her.
𝒻𝖗𝒆ⅇ𝘸𝚎𝚋𝘯𝓸𝓿𝐞𝒍.𝔠𝔬𝓂

Andar reached out and touched the Tower.

The Tower was screaming above him as the Painter’s rage was so vast that the Tower itself was shaking with it.

She knew, in the way women know things they have not been told, that her second half had crossed into a place she could not reach.

The Painter’s attention was entirely on Eos, and it did not register Andar’s arrival, because Andar’s arrival was at the base, and the Painter’s attention was at the top, and the eleventh-dimensional being focused on attacking the tenth-dimensional being did not have a thread spare for the proto-tenth-dimensional being who had just appeared at the base of its house.

Andar would let all of Existence burn for his wife, and still, he took this step, and it took its toll.

The Painter, in its rage, did not feel the door open at the base of its Tower. The Painter did not feel the proto-tenth-dimensional being step through. The Painter felt only Eos, refusing, refusing, refusing.

He did not kneel.

He pushed through.
𝔣𝐫𝒆𝕖𝘸𝚎𝘣𝓃𝒐𝖛ℯ𝓵.𝖈𝘰𝗺

“Kneel,” the Painter screamed, and the screaming was the only thing the Painter could still do.

He looked at the Tower, and it was different from this side. The Tower was no longer at a distance from the Tree. The Tower was adjacent, and the adjacency was a fully three-dimensional adjacency, a closeness that could be traversed.

“Come back to me, my love.”

The step accepted the toll, and Andar was halfway across.

In the house at the edge of everything, Mira opened her eyes.

He held the bird. “I may go far, my love, but my heart has always been yours.”

What Andar gave up was the capacity to return to his original form. The Andar who had stood in the house with Mira, the Andar who had built the chair from a tree on a dead world, and mourned the deaths of all their children…that Andar would not be available on the other side of the crossing.

The creak was the only sound in the house.

It was being fought in four.