The first move had been the laugh of a farmer in a field, and the second move was the silence that followed it.

This is how the game began.

Eos knew that this would be the greatest challenge of his life, but like with all the challenges he would face them without holding back.

As a tenth-dimensional being, he was able to see the future, but because he was against the Painter, that future was blocked whenever the touch of the Painter came near it.

His presence also did the same for the Painter, and it would not be able to manipulate the Origin Tree as it saw fit, and it would only win if its strategy was the best.

Although Eos could not see the future, he could still see the general shape of it, and he knew that this conflict would not end for a span of time that no surviving being would ever be able to describe accurately, and even those who survived to its end would never agree on how long it had taken, because they had lived through different shapes of it.

There would be accounts, and there would, in fact, be civilisations whose entire scholarly tradition would be devoted to the reconstruction of the period now beginning, and these civilisations would be born and would mature and would fall and would be replaced by others who would also devote themselves to the reconstruction of it, and not one of these traditions would ever produce a complete chronology, because no chronology could hold what was about to happen.

What was about to happen was that two beings of the tenth dimension would, across the substrate of a Grand Void that was now the only theatre for the only remaining match, try to reshape Existence itself into the shape that suited them best.

One would do it with the intention of giving life free will and the chance to reach for Telos, and the other saw all life as pieces on a board for its endless amusement, and what amused this being was suffering.

Every life caught between them could opt out of this game, because the rules of the game made every life a piece; every life would, in some way, might never become aware of the fact that they were in a grand game between two beings. 𝓯𝙧𝓮𝓮𝒘𝓮𝙗𝙣𝒐𝒗𝒆𝓵.𝓬𝓸𝒎

®

This game was divided into multiple stages, and each stage was an age. From the moment the Painter released Erosion and Eos sent joy into the Origin Realms, the first age began.

In the first age, which lasted somewhere between four hundred billion and six hundred billion Cosmic Era, depending on whose chronology you consulted, Eos did what he had said he would do.

He filled the Grand Void with small joys. His essence reaching across all things, no matter how far or how many they were, he was there... Eos had truly gained omnipotence and omniscience.

Eos simply began, in the quiet way that had been his nature since the bloom of the farmer in the seven-hour world, to nudge the inhabitants of his Tree into ordinariness, into the small unreasoned moments of being glad to be alive that had been the rarest commodity in the previous Existences and was about to become, in this one, the abundant one.

A child in a world on the seventeenth branch of the Origin Tree pulled a stone out of a stream and decided, for no reason, that the stone was beautiful. She kept it and did not show anyone.

The keeping became a habit, and the habit became a temperament. The temperament passed, after she died, into the descendants who had lived in the same valley and had absorbed her quiet presence the way a room absorbs the smell of bread.

A thousand generations later, that valley produced a culture whose entire ethical structure was organized around the dignity of the unspoken inner life.

The Painter never learned what had started it, because the starting was a stone in a stream a thousand generations earlier, and the stone in the stream had been a nudge that lasted no longer than a heartbeat.

A widower in a world on the four hundred and ninth branch sat down at his table, three years after the death of his wife, and found that he could pour himself a cup of tea without weeping.

He did not celebrate this. He noted it without pulling any attention to it, drank the tea, and went back to work. The Painter, who had been watching him for three years with the slow, patient appetite of a spectator who knows when a grief is about to peak, registered the moment and did not know what to do with it.

The widower had not recovered. Recovery would have been a dramatic event. The widower had simply, in some small private adjustment, stopped expecting the absence to hurt.

There was no peak, and no climax. The grief had been smoothed out by an unobtrusive nudge from the tenth dimension, into something the widower could carry.

The Painter watched for another year, waiting for the spectacle to resume, but it did not resume. The Painter eventually moved its attention elsewhere. It had been forced, for the first time, to give up on a piece without the satisfaction of either victory or loss.

This would happen, in the first age, four hundred and twelve quintillion times, every single Cosmic Era, and this number would only grow.

These were not strategic moves. None of them was meant to win the game. Each of them was meant to do the thing that was hardest for the Painter to model, which was to be uneventful in an interesting way. And the cumulative effect, over four hundred trillion years, was that the Painter found its modeling capacity, vast, patient, oldest of arts, beginning to back up.

It did not crash; the Painter was far too powerful for that to happen to it. What was happening was that no one had ever used these tactics before, and for a brief moment, it did not know how to respond to it... and this brief moment to Eos and the Painter was billions of Cosmic Eras.

The Painter had built itself for the deltas of suffering, and in this case, the deltas were where the spectacle lived. Deltas it understood. Deltas it had named. Deltas it had categorised in a scheme so refined that no being’s anguish could surprise it. But the silting was new because it was Eos’s invention.

The silting was the slow accumulation of countless tiny moments of being alive that did not arrive at any delta, did not feed any spectacle, and could therefore not be modeled by the systems the Painter had developed across millions of Existences for the management of meaning.

The Painter responded the only way it could, which was to play harder, and it could only do that by opening more seams.

It was at this point that the Painter began to unveil its full might.

End had been one tool, one that it had used against Eos’s previous Existence, but in the million million Existence that had appeared before now, the Painter had gathered a family of tools, and the Painter had been holding back its full lineage for a long time.

Now the Painter began to deploy them.

There was Drift, which was not Erosion’s brother but its cousin, and which worked by very gently relocating a being’s center of gravity.