A small frown slipped past Eos’s face before it disappeared.

"Then what am I?"

The Painter smiled. Eos could not see the smile, but the shrouded shape shifted in a way that suggested it, and said:

"You are the first piece I have been unable to watch without being watched back. Every one of the forty-four has done it in their way. Each one has looked up at me from the floor. Each one has met my attention with attention of their own. It is an extraordinary sensation. It is also, as you can perhaps understand, the thing I have spent every subsequent era of my existence trying to prevent from happening again. And yet here we are."

"So the game..."

"Is whether I can put you back on the floor," the Painter said, "or whether you can drag me out of the stands?"

It gestured at the board between them.

"Shall we?" it said.

®

Eos looked at the board, and he did not look at the shrouded figure of the Painter again. He did not need to. He had, in the long telling of the first Existence, seen the shape of the thing he was playing against, and the shape was not what he had prepared for.

The thing was that Eos had prepared for grief and tyranny. He had expected to find the Painter to be a being broken by its own love of a thing it could not keep.

He had not prepared for the Painter to be an audience.

The audience was a worse opponent than a tyrant. A tyrant could be deposed. An audience could not.

An audience simply moved to another theater when its present one failed, and the theaters were Existences, and the Painter had been moving theaters for longer than memory, and the current theater, his Existence, the Origin Tree, and every life on every branch, was simply the most recent one.

The Painter did not want to destroy it. The Painter wanted to watch it.

Which would not be such a bad thing if what this being wanted to watch was mostly suffering.

The Painter had been watching his Existence from the first moment Eos took a breath in the body of a dying prince in a room full of bodies. Every loss Eos had suffered, every victory, every moment of grief or love or terror across a hundred million years, all of it had been spectacle, to the thing in the chair across from him... All of it had been rich content.

The game was not a war to this being; it was a performance. And Eos, if he wished to win, could not merely play well.

He would have to make the audience look away, just because he could not reach across and choke this audience to death.

Eos looked at the board, and then at the seam the Painter had opened, and he observed Erosion beginning its quiet work on the outermost worlds of the Tree, before turning and looking at his pieces. 𝙛𝒓𝓮𝙚𝔀𝒆𝒃𝓷𝒐𝓿𝙚𝓵.𝙘𝒐𝒎

And he found, very carefully, the piece that he believed the Painter did not yet fully understand.

Not Eva, Vraegar, Circe, or any of the brilliant choices that the Painter was already watching with the particular hunger of a spectator. Not Prime or Serathis or any of the obvious powers.

He found, on the board, the farmer.

The farmer was in a world that had bloomed seven hours ago, but in local time, this was seven million years, and he was standing in his field, holding a tool he had been given the evening before, beginning to understand what it was for.

The farmer was not a player, or any being of particular destiny or genius; simply put, this farmer was a nobody. A mortal in a single world on a single branch of a tree in a vast new Existence, whose entire life, whose entire possible future, would consist of farming this one field and loving one or two people and raising one or two children and dying in ordinary time.

Eos moved the farmer.

He did it very small, as he simply reached, with his tenth-dimensional awareness, and gave the farmer, without the farmer knowing, the smallest nudge.

This nudge was a bloom, which was an unearned, unexplained moment of gladness, delivered into the farmer’s chest without warning, for no reason, on this first afternoon of his existence under the eyes of Eos.

The farmer, on the board, paused in his field, and he looked up. Without any warning, he began to laugh.

It was a small, ordinary laugh, the laugh of a man who had felt, for one instant, very glad to be alive. It was not a cosmic event that burned with power; it was a single small unremarkable laugh in a single small unremarkable world.

The Painter, across the table, made a small sound. Eos did not look up since he did not need to. He had heard the sound before, in himself, a hundred million years ago, the first time he had seen something so ordinary and so unearned that he had not known what to do with it. It was the sound of attention being caught.

The Painter, in spite of itself, had watched.

"Interesting," the Painter said, after a moment. Its voice was careful.

"Yes," Eos said.

"You moved a nothing."

"I moved a moment of joy in a mortal who will never know he was moved."

"And you believe this does something."

"I believe," Eos said quietly, looking now at the seam of Erosion leaking into his outermost worlds, "that your Erosion works by emptying things of their reach. And I believe that one small unearned joy, uncaused, given to one nobody who will never explain it, is a shape of reach that Erosion does not have a model for. I believe you will have to spend attention on figuring out how to model it. And I believe that while you are spending attention figuring out how to model it, you will not be spending attention on the next move."

The Painter was silent.

Then it said, with something that might have been, for the first time in this conversation, a faint ripple of genuine surprise:

"You are going to play with joy."

"I am going to play with ordinariness," Eos said. "Joy is one of its faces."

"Against me."

"Against you."

"You understand," the Painter said slowly, "that I have seen joy. I have watched a trillion trillion joys across a million million Existences. I am not unfamiliar with it."

"You are familiar with joy as spectacle," Eos said. "You are familiar with joy as a bright thing on the floor of an amphitheater where you are seated in the stands. You are not familiar with joy as quiet, that does not announce itself because you are the audience, and audiences only watch the performers."

He looked up at the shrouded shape.

"I am going to fill the Grand Void with joys that do not perform. Small ones. The kind you cannot watch because there is no stage. I will move them slowly, in quantities and in qualities that exhaust your modeling capacity. And while you are trying to model them, my pieces will grow, and my Tree will root deeper, and the Erosion you have set against me will find itself working in a soil that does not remember how to be eroded, because it is not reaching toward anything you can see. It is reaching toward its own quiet, small life."