The Primordial Record

In the deepest stratum of the oldest Origin Realm, inside a sealed chamber, the small white-haired child was not looking at anything since he was modeling.

There were few things that could wrap up the mind of Rowan like this, and he had placed so much attention on what he was doing that he had not bothered to change his shape or find the energy to cleanse his body, which was filled with the power of End.

He just suppressed this poison in his veins and focused on this elaborate dance in front of him, and everything faded away like dust before the wind.

He had been modeling for a long time, and the modeling had grown more elaborate as he had grown more familiar with the rhythms of the long move, but he had not, in any of the modeling, looked at the players. Rowan was clear about his weakness, and he was not arrogant enough to think he could look upon the face of those entities; no, he was looking at the board and had been doing so for a long time as his modeling became more elaborate.

All of his endless potential was focused on this task, and as Grand Cosmic Eras passed, even he, who had not touched the tenth dimension, under his impossible talent began to notice things over these long stretches of time, and one of the things that he noticed was that the board had a faint texture.

It was at a level beneath the pieces. What this meant was that the board was structured. It was made up of something, and he wanted to understand what that thing was even more than he wanted to understand the game.

Over time, he had noticed that this board was made up of what he called grain, because he saw them as fine particles, countless times smaller than an atom, and not even Primordials could discern their shapes.

The child was not yet at the point of asking what the grain meant. After all this time, he was only at the point of noticing that the grain was there, and so he continued modeling.

As time went by, he began observing the effect of the grain and saw that none of them were deliberate on the substrate of the new Existence.

The effects they had were seemingly small and were not in any direction. The effects were what a sealed chamber’s faint pressure on a dimension produces when the chamber’s occupant is paying patient attention to something for a very long time.

Vraegar, who was the only being in the new Existence aware of the chamber’s existence, sat outside the chamber’s outermost seal and did not enter and did not speak. He had not entered or spoken in a long time. His role was not to interfere; his role was to keep the chamber sealed against everything except the substrate, which he could not seal against and would not have wanted to.

He had become, over the Grand Cosmic Eras, a creature whose entire purpose was the maintenance of one sealed door.

The dragon found, somewhat to his surprise, that he liked the work. In this grand game, he was unknowingly the third player’s keeper, and the third player did not know he was the third player, and Vraegar did not know what the third player was doing or whether the third player would, at some point, do something the keeper would have to act on. He simply kept the door.

The dragon did not even know he was the keeper; the only thing he knew was that as the long years passed, he had found peace standing before this door, and for him, that was all that mattered.

Eos, at the board, and he did not look at Vraegar or Rowan. This was a deliberate non-looking, and it cost Eos a small continuous effort to maintain, and Eos paid the cost without any regret; it was just a small piece in the overall game.

The Painter knew, vaguely, that the substrate of the new Existence had a faint pressure on it from somewhere it could not locate, and the Painter had assumed, when it first noticed the pressure, that the pressure was an artifact of Eos’s tenth-dimensional presence as the Telos of the new Existence.

When it had investigated, it had seen the shades of Vraegar, but not Rowan, although it knew that something was there, and it suspected it was Rowan, but to the Painter, Rowan’s effect on the game was so small it was almost negligible, and so the Painter had not investigated further.

This was not a mistake of the Painter’s. This was the consequence of an assumption the Painter had baked into its understanding of the game.

It was the assumption that there were two players who could ultimately decide how this game was to be played. After all, from the beginning of time, there had never been a ninth dimensional entity who could touch the substrate of the tenth dimension, not even Eos had been able to do this.

Ⓔ

Eos, at the table, made his fourth move of the second age, and following a familiar pattern, he made what could be considered a small move and simply gave a name to a wind on a continent on a world on the seventy-third infected branch.

The wind had not had a name before. It had been simply the south wind. He did not give it a name himself; he allowed, at the level of taste in the substrate, the inhabitants of a particular coastal region to find a name for it.

The name they found was a word in their language that meant, approximately, the breath of something passing.

The wind, having been named, was now a piece, and this piece was below the resolution of the board, and what was important to Eos was that the Painter would not see it.

By not using Erasure, the Painter had created a weakness in its sight, and by the time the Painter saw it, the wind would have been named by sailors on a thousand worlds, and the name would have entered the songs the sailors sang, and the songs would have entered the harbor cities, and the harbor cities would have entered the trade routes, and the trade routes would have entered the substrate again at a different point than the adro propagation had entered it.

And so the second propagation would interfere with the first in a way Eos had calculated would produce, after sufficient time, a constructive resonance in the substrate’s faint property of something is missing here.