Published at 6th of July 2026 6:56 am

Chapter 2238: The Man And The Lady

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The Painter watched Eos, expecting him to have made a move to counter the spread of the Taste, but he did nothing and seemed to be observing what it had unleashed.

Knowing how Eos handled the situation, the Painter knew that he would not make a move before fully confirming and understanding what was happening, or he would make a move out of the left fields, something that the Painter would find hard to decipher at a glance.

At the moment, the Painter was eager to see what Eos would do, but as it watched, Eos remained in place, not making any move.

However, at this point, the Painter was right and wrong. Eos was doing nothing but observing the Taste in action, but that was because he had already left plans in place that were beyond even his children, the Primordials.

After all, it was a good thing that for a creator like him, he had many children.

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A beautiful woman was in a small chamber in the deepest part of Sheba’s keeping.

This chamber was crafted from Sheba’s own body, but she was not even aware that it was inside her. A part of her knew that this chamber existed, but that part had been isolated from her consciousness in such a brilliant manner that she would never know it existed.

This chamber was folded out of Telos for this woman at the end of the first age and given to her as her library.

The library held all the questions that had not been asked across the trillions of branches, and the beautiful woman had been working in the library for the entire second age, listening for new questions about to not be asked and writing them down.

The Taste reached the world, and she felt the questions stop.

With her access to Telos, she knew that this was the dimension of the Taste she felt, but the Taste did not transform her; she was not a Primordial in the formal sense, but Eos had built her chamber into Telos in a way that made her substrate inaccessible to expression from outside.

This had cost Eos a vast portion of his powers, but he had loved her and had taken care that she would be safe, and so the Taste could not reach her body. What reached her was the silence in her work.

The questions about to not be asked were, almost universally, questions whose asking required a body and a mind in cooperation.

Who watches?

Am I alone?

Is this all?

These were questions a person asked when their body was at rest, and their mind had room to wander, but the Taste had taken away the rest. This was the reason the woman had heard silence when the Taste was unleashed.

The lives in the Origin Tree were no longer at rest, as their bodies were performing a dance of madness, and their minds could only watch it happen.

The woman’s library, which had been growing for nine Grand Cosmic Eras at a rate she had grown accustomed to, stopped growing.

Across the trillions of branches, the questions not to be asked were, in this hour, not occurring. There were no questions to catch. There was only the madness of the Taste.

She sat in the library among the questions she had already collected and began to slowly understand what was happening.

The woman had been close to her master long enough to recognize the architecture of the Painter move when she felt one in her work. She did not know the details, but she did not need to.

She did the only thing she could do, which was to read... this was the task that Eos had charged her with in the first place.

The woman began at the first question the library had ever caught, and she read forward, slowly, taking each question in her hands and reading it aloud to the chamber, because the chamber was sealed against all of the new Existence except the substrate of the new Existence.

Her voice in the chamber would reach no one except the substrate, but the substrate was where the Taste was being expressed, and she knew her master well enough to know that her master, somewhere, was attending to the substrate, and her master might hear her voice in the substrate as a small private sound under the noise of the Taste.

She read the questions.

Who is watching? Am I alone? Is this all? What is the texture of the morning? Does the light come from somewhere? Why does my mother leave her shoes by the door?

The small questions and the great. The questions of children and the questions of the dying. The questions about to not be asked, all of them, the years and Cosmic Eras of caught language she had been holding for him.

She read them aloud to the chamber, slowly, in the voice she had used for her master when he was a child, and the substrate carried her voice, and somewhere very far away her master was at a table with the Painter, and her voice, faint, reached him under the noise of the Taste, and her master knew, hearing it, what she was doing.

It was the only company he had at this point, but it was enough.

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The man was in the Black Tower, which he had inherited and remade after the events of the first age.

He had spent the second age studying the propagation of the adro signature and the Painter’s grammar, and the wind named the breath of something passing, because his Meditation Art’s particular gift was the absorption of patterns at the substrate level, and Eos had quietly, without ever asking, allowed his instruments to detect what the rest of the Tree’s instruments could not.

The man had understood, by the end of the first age, that Eos was playing a game he could not see all of.

He had not pressed his father for details. He had simply, in the Black Tower, prepared the Tower’s archives to receive whatever Eos might one day need archived.

When the Taste reached the world, he was at his desk, a picture of his wife and three children on it, alongside other instruments he had gathered over the Eras.

The Taste passed around him. He was a Primordial in his own right by now, had been for nearly a Grand Cosmic Era; he had reached the level by means of the Light Devourer that had become, across the long years, not a passenger but an extension of him, and the Light Devourer’s Origin Force was not a substrate the Taste expressed through.

What he had received was the data.

He had built, in the Tower, instruments calibrated to the substrate of the Tree, a means to detect the hands of the Painter!

The instruments, when the Taste was expressed, registered everything, every body, every hand, every mind inside every hand, every variation of the Taste across every life it reached. The instruments recorded the entire Taste.

The man sat at his desk and watched the instruments record. He had expected to feel many things in this hour, when it came, because he had known an hour of this kind would come.

He had not expected to feel what he felt, which was recognition. The Taste, as it expressed, had a shape, and the shape was a shape he had seen before.

The man had seen it in the substrate of the Tree, faintly, for the entire second age. He had seen it in the texture of the materials Eos used to build the Origin Realms. He had seen it in the bones of the new Existence.

More importantly, during the time he was dead, he had learned to recognize it.

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