Published at 6th of July 2026 6:56 am

Chapter 2237: The Tears of A Primordial

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Eos sat before his board and watched his world being torn apart.

He was watching a number of lives that did not resolve to a number, and he was watching all of them simultaneously, because his attention as Telos of the new Existence was capable of distributing across every life in the Tree at once.

Eos had long ago decided that he would not distribute his attention selectively when his children were suffering, and had committed to attend to all of them, no matter how much that would hurt him; it was his duty, and he attended to all of them now.

His attention was inside Liahra at the river when her hand tightened around the collar of her dog. It was inside Veris at his easel when his hand made the first wrong stroke. It was inside the musician and the surgeon and the poet and the grandmother and the doctor and the teacher and the priest and the uncountable others who were, in this same instant across uncountable worlds, beginning to do what their bodies had been made to do.

He felt the dog die at Liahra’s hand, and he felt Liahra’s mind inside the smile. He felt Veris cut the painting, and he felt the four hours the painting had taken to make. He felt the surgeon’s hands and the surgeon’s mind inside the hands.

Eos had felt all of them at once, across every infinity in the Tree, and the feeling was the kind of feeling that cannot be borne, but he bore it, because there was no version of bearing it that did not involve bearing it, and he had decided long ago that he would.

He did not look away, and the Painter, across the table, watched him not look away.

The Painter said nothing during this period. Eos showed it nothing, but it knew that Eos was suffering, and when it was able to break the heart of Eos, only then would the true feast begin, of the likes that even the Painter had not experienced before.

It had participated in the creation of a being like Eos, but since the Painter was not a creator, it could not fully determine what would emerge on the other end.

Whether it was by fate or the inevitable outcome of eternity... a being like Eos was born, one that was both powerful and benevolent, and it gave the Painter a sort of delight that it never believed it would be able to experience, not even in countless eternities.

However, before it could consume Eos, it would begin with his true children... the Primordials.

The Painter had watched them grow for almost two ages, and now it was time to begin preparing them for what was to come.

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The Primordials, as ninth-dimensional beings, were not under the influence of the Painter curse. The Taste was a property the Painter had buried in the medium of Telos for the suffering of beings whose bodies were composed of that medium without the further structure of Origin Force to resist.

Eva, Telmus, Fury, Circe, Victorious Genesis, Sheba, Thenos, and the rest of the New Primordials had Origin Force in their bodies of a kind that the Taste, as the Painter had calibrated it for this course, could not directly express through, and the Taste passed around them.

However, the Painter knew that the true feast of suffering could only be gained in the minds of immortals, and so to prepare them, he gave all ninth dimensional entities the gift of the watching.

Eva was in the seventeenth Origin Realm, where she had been working with a council of mortals and lesser immortals on the architecture of a new conservatory of light.

This was among one of the many works she had been doing with pleasure for nine Cosmic Eras, because she had decided, after her ascension, that her Primordial work would be the cultivation of beauty in the small, specific way she had once been.

Eva was born from a flower, and at her core, light and beauty were what she desired, and she would walk across the endless creation, spreading this light, and in the process, understand more of her Origins, so that one day she would ascend to meet Eos outside of Existence.

When the Taste reached the worlds of the seventeenth Origin Realm, she felt the wrongness in Existence.

Even though Eva could not easily detect the influences of the tenth dimension, over the long Cosmic Eras that had passed, she began to note traces of powers that could not be easily explained as Origin.

She knew that Eos was still fighting a battle beyond all Primordials, and these traces were the signs of that battle entering Existence.

However, she had not sensed any traces as vast and all-encompassing as this one; it was no longer a trace, it was screaming in her head.

To Eva, all things in Existence were like the songs that Rowan loved, and she had felt many songs as the Primordial of Revelations.

She had heard the songs of birth, the songs of dawn, the songs of mortals discovering grace, but the song that was now screaming in her head was unlike any that she had ever heard before.

What she did not know, but would slowly realize as time passed, was that the song was the simultaneous, distributed expression of the Taste in every life it had reached, and her sense as the Primordial of Revelation gave her access to the song as a unified phenomenon, and the access was not something she had asked for and was not something she could refuse.

The Painter had made sure that this was the case.

With this song, Eva was able to feel the madness permeating Existence, and the more she sensed, the more her vision grew beyond what was permissible to a Primordial.

If she wanted, she could have stopped herself from listening, but she did not, and her mind expanded beyond what any Primordial should tolerate, and yet there was still more pouring in.

The sort of horror that Eva felt at this moment was beyond anything she had ever encountered, not even when she met Enoch.

The scale of suffering was at a level that she could not ignore, and so she tried to stop them.

Eva extended her power as the Primordial of Revelation across the worlds in her reach, and the power did not connect.

The Taste was not a thing she could counter at the level of Revelation. Revelation reveals; Revelation does not interpose. She tried to interpose anyway.

Eva poured her Origin Force into a single world to see if she could, in a single world, halt the Taste’s expression. The Origin Force entered the world, and the world received it, but the Taste continued.

The Origin Force was not shaped to address the substrate that the Taste was expressing through. Her Origin Force was the medium next to the medium the Taste was using, so they did not touch.

She poured more, not believing she could do anything. Eva gave so much of herself that if not for the impossible regenerative power of Origin, she might have forced her body to enter into slumber just to recover, but the Taste continued, and all her efforts did not halt it by a single bit.

She understood, after some span of trying, that her power was not the right shape. She had known, abstractly, that the enemy of Eos operated at a level above her. She had not, until this instant, felt the particular difference, the way a being who can lift mountains might still be unable to write a single letter of an alphabet she does not know.

She knew the alphabet of Origin. The Taste was written in a different alphabet, and she could not read it, nor could she interpret what she could not read.

Knowing she could do nothing, Eva collapsed to her knees and watched the madness across Existence, and she did not turn away.

She wept, and her tears were the tears of a Primordial, which carry weight that mortal tears do not carry, and the tears fell into the seventeenth Origin Realm, and where they fell things grew that had not grown before, and the growing was the only response she could make, and the growing did not save anyone, but she kept weeping because the alternative was to stop weeping, and to stop weeping during the song was a thing she would not do.

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