The second age drew to a close, and Eos was already anticipating that this game would continue like this for a thousand ages, and small victories would accumulate into greater victories that would ultimately lead to his victory or his loss.

Everything in the second age did not go according to his wishes, but it was a miracle that he had been able to accomplish the things that he did, and from here forward, it was just a path of endless refinements, until everything fell into place.

The Painter, without any warning, set its hand flat on the board and waited until Eos looked at it.

A long time passed, and Eos refused to look at the hand until he acknowledged that he needed to look at the hand or the game would not proceed, and he could not risk this happening.

At this time, the advantage of the game fell under the camp of the Painter because the game was taking place on his Origin Tree; every single decision there were making was affecting Eos’s foundation, and yet the Eternal Tower of the Painter was free from this chaos.

This was the innate advantage of the Painter that could not be taken away, no matter the sort of brilliant moves that Eos makes, and he could not afford to know why the Painter had blocked off a section of the game, and even knowing the look was a victory for the Painter, Eos still had to submit, and so he looked.

"You have arrived," the Painter said. "I have been waiting."

Eos paused and looked at the Painter. The voice that had emerged from this being was not the brisk, amused voice that it usually used; there was something raw and wrong with this sound, and Eos felt a chill travel through his spine.

"The first age was your tutorial," the Painter said. "I let you have it because I wanted to see what shape you would grow into. The early second age was your audition. You passed. The trade I offered with the Erasure was my final test, and you refused the architecture, and in refusing, you told me what you are. Do you know what you are?"

Eos did not answer. A growing fear was emerging in his heart, as some of his greatest fears began to arise with every word that the Painter was saying.

"You are the first opponent in a hundred Existences who is worth what I am about to do. And you are the first who has begun, dimly, to ask the right question."

The Painter laughed, and its voice grew lower, almost silky-smooth, as something else seemed to have taken its place.

"At the end of the first age," the Painter said, "you wondered, and set the wondering aside before you could complete it, what assumptions I have baked into the board itself. I will tell you. Not because telling you is a... flavor, yes, flavor, I like that word. The flavors I have prepared for the second age are extensive, and one of them is the flavor of you knowing, in advance, the shape of the trap you cannot leave."

Saying this, the Painter brought up his hand and plunged it into the center of his shrouded face, and he began to tear that darkness apart that Eos was not able to see through.

Eos did not know who or what he would see behind this darkness, and he unconsciously held his breath, and when the darkness was torn in two by the Painter, what was behind it was... an amphitheater.

At the tenth dimension, the bodies of Eos and the Painter could be as big and small as they wanted, and despite knowing that this was the truth, Eos did not expect what he was seeing upon witnessing the true face of the Painter.

The amphitheater was larger than the Origin Tree, and there were tier on tier of seats rising into a darkness that had no ceiling because the ceiling was not part of the architecture; the architecture was only seats and the floor, and the floor extended forever.

On these endless seats were countless figures leaning forward, and their shapes were not the same, as they possessed all forms of shapes that had ever been or ever will be, but the only thing that united them all were the desires in their bodies that could not be hidden... a perversion so deep that only by shading it under darkness could anyone ever stand the idea of being near a creature like the Painter.

Eos’s gaze swept across these endless crowd, there were more of them than the Origin Tree had branches... more of them than the worlds the Origin Tree carried, and they had been watching everything and everyone in every Existence the Painter had ever made, and they had been watching him from the moment of his rebirth as a sick prince in a room full of corpses, and they had watched him kill the demon wolf and watched him bury Augustus and watched him slumber for centuries and watched him become Eos and watched him make the new Existence and watched him refuse the trade in the second age

All of this time, he thought he was playing against a singular being, but he was wrong; he was playing against a legion. The darkness had hidden them from Eos, but it had not hidden Eos from them.

"I am nothing but an audience."

Eos gave a self-deprecating smile. The Painter had told him the truth of its nature from the start, and he was the one who had not picked up the clue until it was too late.

However, Eos had lived for too long and fought against too many monsters to be shaken for long, and after that brief moment of self-chastisement, he focused on what was in front of him.

They had names. Eos understood this without being told. They were not anonymous; the Painter knew every one of them, had known them across the long ages of its work, had been painting for them by name, and the names would have meant nothing to Eos because the names were older than the languages Eos had ever learned, but each figure in the tiers was a distinct being with a distinct appetite, and the Painter had been catering to each appetite for longer than the concept of long had a referent.

"They have always been here," the Painter said. "They have always been able to reach you, and I will tell you why."