The Primordial Record

Eos had now placed two pieces below the Painter’s resolution that interfered with each other in a productive way.

Even though it did not seem like much, he had begun his counterattack.

He began, while attending to his other work, to consider what a third such piece would look like.

Eos did not consider it long before he set the consideration aside. The third piece would come when the third piece came. The long move was not in a hurry, and if he decided to push too quickly, he might lose the positions that he had gained.

Too many hands spoil the broth.

The Painter, finally, returned its full attention to the propagation of deceit it had unleashed upon Existence, and after all this time, it had not stopped, and the infected branches were still propagating its poison. The Cancellation was still working at its task, and the Painter had now, by lifting and not placing the Erasure, given Eos forty thousand Cosmic Eras of additional propagation time, and this propagation had reached one hundred and twelve branches.

What this entire battle was focused on was simple. Eos had shaken the game by making mortals, and everyone became aware of a presence outside Existence that was watching them, but the Painter would never want something like this to happen.

And so from that point forward, every move made by the Painter was to erase that decision that Eos had made, and Eos was fighting to preserve that decision.

The battle of the second age would be about this, and it was unknown who would come out ahead.

The Painter considered its options, and it saw that a direct counter to the propagation was not available. The Cancellation could not be closed, and The Erasure had been declined and could not be lifted again without revealing further intelligence.

It had other reserved pieces, but using a reserved piece on a propagation that was not yet a doctrinal threat would be a poor use of reserves.

After contemplating for a while, the Painter chose to work at the level Eos was working at. The Painter would seed its own pieces below its own resolution.

This was a choice with a cost. Pieces below the Painter’s resolution were pieces the Painter could not directly observe. The Painter would have to operate, in some portion of the game, at a level where the Painter’s observation of its own moves was imperfect.

This was uncomfortable for it as the Painter had, for endless cycles and millions of total Existences, played the game from above. To play from below required a different posture.

However, the Painter was slowly adapting, and it soon adopted the posture.

It made, on a branch unrelated to the propagation, a small move involving the introduction of a particular grammatical construction into the legal language of a confederation of city-states.

The construction was a passive voice with no implied agent. It permitted sentences in which something happened without anyone having done it. The Painter introduced the construction so casually, at such a low resolution, that the construction took root in the legal language and from there spread to the literary language and from there to common speech, and within a Cosmic Era, the inhabitants of the affected branch were habitually speaking in a grammar where things happened without doers.

The grammar would, over Cosmic Eras, slightly attenuate the inhabitants’ capacity to feel that something is being done to them.

This was the Painter’s first below-resolution piece of the second age, and Eos quickly noticed it.

He noticed it because he had been looking for exactly this kind of move. Unlike the Painter, who had the pride of endless victories, Eos did not think that the Painter would allow him to have this advantage for long.

He had assumed, after the trade refusal, that the Painter would either escalate to another reserved piece or descend to the substrate level. The escalation had not happened, but the descent had.

And at this point, he did not know which one was worse.

He allowed the grammar to take root and did not interfere. Eos had a counter to the grammar, but the counter was not yet appropriate to deploy.

The counter was below the resolution of the Painter’s below-resolution move, which meant Eos was now operating at a level two orders below the visible board.

The visible board, at the top of the Eternal Tower, was no longer where the game was being played; now, the game was being played in the substrate. In the languages. In the songs. In the winds. In the slow accumulation of small habits across trillions of worlds.

The game would continue at this level and below this level for the rest of the second age.

Both players knew this now, yet neither player said so.

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In the chamber, the small white-haired child finished one model and began another.

A faint laugh of joy in his accomplishment touched the air before it vanished. It was the only sign that he had just accomplished something so ridiculous that no one except for Eos and the Painter could understand it.

This was a level of genius so profound that to everyone else, it was madness.

Even if Vraegar entered this chamber to observe Rowan, he would only see him, lying on his back and pointing at space while mumbling nonsense.

Now and then, he would pinch and twist the air as if he were turning a dial on an invisible nub, and no matter how much they looked at his actions, it would be impossible to know what he was doing.

The new model he had just made was different from the previous one in a way only the child could have explained, and the child did not explain anything because the child had no one to explain anything to.

He simply continued the work, which was to enhance his knowledge of the board and familiarize himself with more complex models.

The substrate of the new Existence, faintly, in a way that was not anywhere visible, took on the shape of his attention.