The words of the Painter shook the room... and it paused for a moment, as if it wanted Eos to fully appreciate the weight of its words before it continued,

"Everything I had not yet done. They loved, built, fought, cooperated, invented languages...."

The Painter seemed to have been transported to the first Existence, as its voice became a bit more wistful, "They ate and drank, had children... they died, and mourned, and they began again. All of it was new, all of it was happening for the first time in any reality that had ever existed, and I sat in the stands, and I took it in, and the taking in was the most extraordinary experience of my—of what I then learned to call my—life."

It’s paused here, and Eos made no sound; he did not even move an inch, and the Painter nodded in satisfaction before it continued its tale.

"I had been attention without object for an eternity. Now I had object. And I discovered that the object was better, the richer the beings on the floor suffered."

"Suffered."

"Specifically. Yes. Joy was a fine spectacle, I will not claim otherwise, I have no reason to lie here, but suffering was finer. Suffering at novelty is the densest concentration of new information that the universe has ever produced. A being experiencing a thing for the first time that it does not know how to process is a pitch of flavor that nothing else comes close to. I had made beings. I sat in the stands. I watched them find out about grief. I watched them find out about betrayal. I watched them find out about the thing they loved being taken from them and not coming back. And every moment of it, to me, was magnificent."

Eos’s tenth-dimensional flesh did not move; he so wanted to move, but he did not reach this point by being overly rash.

"Did you intervene?" he said.

"Often."

"To—"

"To maintain the pitch. Yes. When they began to understand their suffering, I would change the rules. When they began to build defenses against the worst of what was happening to them, I would introduce a new form of harm they had not been equipped for. When they began to speak of me in the stands—and some of them did, in the later eras—I would break the speaker and cause it to be known, among the others on the floor, that speaking of me had consequences. It was an experiment, you understand. It was the first experiment. I was learning what I had made and what I could do with it."

"How long did this last?"

"Their time or mine."

"Theirs."

"Their last historian estimated eleven hundred thousand of what they called Grand Cosmic Eras. They were wrong by a factor of six, but it was an impressive estimate for beings of their constraints."

"And yours."

"Mine is not measurable in their units."

"Then what ended it?"

The Painter was silent for a moment.

"The floor... cracked."

Eos waited for the explanation about what that meant, even though he was sure he understood the significance and meaning of those words.

"In all those generations, I had not anticipated that the floor would crack. I had designed them to suffer, but I had also designed them to think, and thinking and suffering together, over enough time, produce— eventually, inevitably—the beginning of a kind of collective attention that I had not accounted for. They did not, by the end, defeat me. They did not organize against me or build weapons that could harm me. They did something subtler. They began to attend to me in return."

"Attend?"

"Notice. The way I noticed them. For eras I had been the only noticer in the amphitheater, and they had been objects of the noticing, and the asymmetry of that had been, I had thought, a structural fact. At some point in the last hundred thousand of their generations, the asymmetry began to break down. Some of them—their philosophers, their madmen, their children—began to notice that they were being noticed. And once they had noticed that, they began to notice me."

"And that—"

"Ruined it," the Painter said.

"Immediately. Totally. The pleasure of the spectacle depended on the asymmetry. The pleasure depended on me being the sole witness. The moment they noticed me, I became part of the spectacle rather than its audience, and the flavor collapsed, and I could no longer get anything out of it, no matter what I did to them. I was furious. I had built the first beautiful thing in the history of reality, and it had been ruined by a structural flaw I had not caught in the design. I broke it. That was the end of the first Existence."

"You broke it."

"I broke the floor of the amphitheater. The beings on it died. All of them. Simultaneously. This was not an act of cruelty; by that point, cruelty no longer interested me, because cruelty requires an audience, and they had become an audience. It was an act of clearing. I had a flawed design; I cleared it. I sat afterward in the stands of a now-empty amphitheater and thought for a long while about what had gone wrong and how to do the next one better."

"And you concluded—"

"That the error had been making them capable of noticing me. Every subsequent Existence has been designed around that constraint. The Luminious were my attempt at a servant class that could not, structurally, attend to me in the dangerous way. They were too faithful. I shattered them and scattered them through subsequent Existences, not because I loved them and grieved them, I did not; I have never loved a thing I made, but because their scattered pieces could be useful in maintaining the constraint in new Existences."

"End was my tool for pruning any being that came close to the old threshold. Enoch was my best implementation of End and my worst mistake. Primordials were my compromise, a species of being that could generate rich suffering without the dangerous reflectivity. Your kind—the Eos-class, the forty-four that have arisen in the forty-four Existences—is the one flaw I have never fully corrected. Every so often, one of you shows up. You are always the result of something slipping through the constraint. You are always the most interesting thing on the board, and you are always the thing I have to suppress."

"Why not kill us?"

"I have told you. The dimension will not let me. And even if it would, and I have inquired very thoroughly whether it would, I would not. You are too good. The spectacle of the forty-three who came before you, each of them unique, each of them arriving at their own shape of purpose and forcing me to respond to a new geometry, that spectacle has been the only thing that has interested me since the first Existence broke. I do not want to lose you. Not permanently. I want to beat you, suppress you, add you to the collection of the previous forty-three, and sit with you in your room sometimes, afterward, and enjoy your company."

The Painter paused.

"I am being very frank with you," it said. "I find I would like to be. You may take this as you wish."

Eos looked at it for a long moment. 𝙛𝒓𝓮𝒆𝔀𝒆𝙗𝓷𝒐𝙫𝒆𝙡.𝒄𝓸𝓶

"You are the audience," he said quietly. "That is what you are."

"Yes."

"You are not a creator."

"I have never been a creator. I have been the one who commissions creation. I make things, yes, in the sense that I cause them to come into being, but I do not make them for themselves. I make them to watch. I have always been the one in the stands."