The Cancellation was a terrifying weapon, and Eos, watching this move, finally opened the game to a grander stage. If the Painter expected him to play this game in a way that it would anticipate, then it was going to be disappointing for this being.

Eos did not care about the number of opponents it had faced in the past or how brilliant and terrifying they were; he was a different beast altogether, and he was not playing the game to lose... he had come too far.

As a tenth-dimensional being, even before Eos made a move, he pushed his mind into the future and saw what would come next. A billion trillion futures crumbled in his gaze every second as his Telos clashed against the invisible darkness of the Painter, because the one who seized the future is the victorious one.

Nevertheless, through the crash, Eos could see certain paths that held promise, and he dragged one of these paths closer to his gaze so he could experience it better.

In this path, seeing the terrifying effect of The Cancellation, Eos responded by creating a single new branch on the Origin Tree, a branch that would grow, over the next Cosmic Eras, into the largest branch the Tree had ever produced.

It should be noted that the measurement of time in the Origin Tree roughly remained the same as that of the old Existence. A billion trillion years was an Era, and a billion Eras is one Cosmic Era. Now that Eos was in the tenth dimension, a new scale of time had appeared, and that was the Grand Cosmic Era, where one billion Cosmic Era is equivalent to one Grand Cosmic Era.

On this special branch that Eos created, in time, would bloom a single world. In that world, in time, would be born a single being. That being’s entire life, and the meaning of that being’s entire life, would be devoted to re-asking the question that The Cancellation had taken away.

The being would not know this. The being would think, as all such beings think, that they had come up with the question on their own.

The Painter would see it coming and would prepare, across the Cosmic Eras, the next response. And so it would go, for countless Cosmic Eras.

No!

Eos rejected this vision of the future, knowing that if he followed through with it, he would gain countless small victories, but the overall trend would be that the Painter would win at the end... There has to be something that he could do that would shake this board in a way that the Painter would have no choice but to adjust his hand and reveal more of its strengths to him.

After thinking about what move he should make for a while, Eos simply decided to do... nothing.

The Cancellation kept doing its work, erasing all the progress Eos had made by revealing the fact that tenth-dimensional beings that watched over everything in Existence, and for the next eleven million Cosmic Eras, Eos did not interfere with it.

He had decided, at the beginning of the second age, that the Painter’s first move of the second age was a piece older than Existence and that he would not contest the piece on the substrate where the Painter had armored it.

Eos would not push against the Cancellation. He would let it work, and he would watch the language for who watches erode in eleven million worlds, and in the eighty million and first world, he would do something else.

This was an unusual decision, and even the Painter was surprised. The forty-three contestants before him had, in their second ages or near-equivalents, all attempted to halt the equivalent of the Cancellation directly. The records were not available to Eos; the records had been erased before Origin existed and were therefore not visible to a being whose sight was Origin and Truth.

The Painter, watching him, decided not to halt the Cancellation, but it had paused in a way Eos noted and stored. The pause meant the previous forty-three had done otherwise. The pause was a small piece of information about the past that the Painter had not intended to give him, and the Painter knew, after the pause, that it had given it, and adjusted.

So both of them had now given each other one small, unintended piece. They were even.

Eos had spent eighty million worlds, just for him to see this slight pause in the Painter’s demeanor, and the sad thing about a conflict of this scale was that this pause was worth it. This was the way that this game was played.

However, it was also the time for him to make his move, but Eos still waited for another hundred million Cosmic Eras before he made his second move of the second age, and during those hundred million Cosmic Eras, he did, on the surface of the board, nothing.

He drank from the Grand Void, and he watched. The Painter watched him watching. The Painter, after the first ten million Cosmic Eras of being watched watching, became uneasy in a way it would not have admitted to a peer, if it had peers.

Inactivity at the tenth-dimensional level is not absence. Inactivity is a kind of move. Eos was making a move with his inactivity, and the Painter could not tell what the move was, and the not-telling was the move.

This was a thing Eos had learned, very late in his mortal life, from Maeve. Maeve had once stood beside him for forty days while he was unable to speak, and she had not asked him why he was not speaking, and the not-asking had been the most useful thing anyone had ever done for him.

He had remembered it, something apparently minor from the past, and he used it now against the Painter.

Eos stood at the table and did not speak, and did not move, and let the not-speaking, not-moving become a presence the Painter had to account for.

The Painter accounted for it by adjusting the Cancellation. The Cancellation, which had been built to close the question of who watches, began, under the Painter’s continued attention, to close adjacent questions as well: who is there, am I alone, is this all. The Painter was widening the piece’s scope because Eos’s silence had made the Painter nervous about whether the original scope was sufficient.

This was a mistake.