Published at 6th of July 2026 6:56 am

Chapter 2240: The End of The First Course

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Sheba was vast, and her substrate was complicated. She had been built originally by powers Circe did not fully understand, and Eos had remade portions of her, and Circe had, in her own way, contributed.

The substrate of Sheba was not, formally, the substrate of the Tree. Sheba was an exception. Sheba had been built to be an exception. This was why she could keep things.

But Sheba was adjacent to the Tree’s substrate, and the Taste was expressing across the Tree’s substrate at scale, and adjacency, at this scale, was a kind of contact, and Sheba, for the first time in her life, was able to touch true evil, and that was why she shuddered.

The things inside her, the kept things, began to respond to the Taste, and this made the songs that were in Sheba’s archives want to be sung. The dances wanted to be danced. The wrist movement wanted to be made. The kept things had been held in stasis by Sheba’s keeping, and the power of the Taste was a song so vast that it called to the kept things across the substrate, asking them to join the madness.

Circe walked through Sheba’s halls and felt the kept things straining at their keeping.

She understood what was happening. The Taste was a song the Great One was singing through everybody in the Tree, and the song was so large that everything like the song wanted to harmonize with it.

The kept things were music, gestures, and properties. They wanted, by their nature, to participate in vast expressions. The Taste was a vast expression. The kept things were trying to join.

She did not understand all the intricacies of the tenth dimension, but Circe knew that she could not allow this to happen, and she held them back from leaving the castle and returning to the tree.

From that moment, her job was to walk the halls and hold the kept things in their keeping. Each archive she passed, she touched. Each song, each dance, each gesture, each property, she touched them, and her touch reminded them of why they had been kept, which was that they were Eos’s, and they belonged to a different song than the Painter’s, and the Painter’s song was not theirs to harmonize with.

The kept things obeyed her, mostly, but some of them did not.

Some of the kept things, the older ones, the ones that had come to Sheba before she had been Sheba, when she had been Algoth and under the Prism’s control, did harmonize.

You see, Sheba was one of the few Primordials that were not personally created by Eos, and whose roots predated his rise.

She was born as one of the first children of Eosah, and Eos did not change everything about her construct; he kept some part of her behind.

Originally, this was not a weakness, since he had already won and his Telos had become the foundation of the new Existence, but some part of those old pieces were not part of his Telos, and they heeded the call of the Taste.

Circe felt them slip her keeping and join the Taste, and she could not stop them, because they had been in Sheba’s halls longer than she had, and her authority over them was incomplete.

What slipped from her keeping merged with the Taste.

Noctis and Archimedes, who had been with her for most of the second age, did not even understand what Circe was trying to accomplish, but they could see the state of Existence and knew that this was surely related to that.

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The Taste continued for a Cosmic Era.

The Painter had calibrated it to last that long. The audience member in the four hundred and seventeenth tier had requested a long savoring, and the Painter had honored the request, and the Taste expressed across the Tree for the full Cosmic Era at the scale of every life, with every variation, in every infinity, on every branch.

Eos sat and watched. His attention, across the Cosmic Era, did not fall on a single life and stay; he distributed it across all lives affected by this madness, holding each life for the moments of its particular variation, then moving to the next, and the next, and the next, in a span of attention that was adequate to a calamity like the Taste.

Eos was Telos, and his attention was capable of reaching everything. He recorded each face. He held each mind inside its smile, and held each hand at the end of its work.

He recorded all of them in his mind, and the Painter watched him do this.

The Painter did not speak during the time that the Taste ravaged the Origin Tree. The Painter had said what it needed to say at the announcement, and after that moment, it just sat and watched EosX waiting for the smallest flicker of weakness.

If Eos had given it a chance to see how much it affected him, then the Taste would not last for one Cosmic Era; the Painter would stretch it to a billion cosmic eras!

When the Era came to an end, the Painter allowed the Taste to release the bodies it had taken.

The minds, which had been inside the bodies the whole time, were finally allowed to occupy the bodies again, but this was not a blessing.

What the minds occupied was wreckage.

So much time had passed by, but the mortals held by the Taste did not age or die, what was death to the amusement of the Painter, and a Cosmic Era had passed, enough to exhaust the lifespan of any immortal under the fourth-dimensional level, but mortals like Liahra still remained alive.

When she regained the ability to control her body once more, she chose not to waste this opportunity, and she took her life.

Liahra was one of the lives that, in the hour after the course ended, ended themselves.

Many did. Across the Tree, in counts that did not resolve to numbers, the survivors of the Taste chose, in the hours and days after release, to end themselves rather than live with what their bodies had done.

The Painter had calibrated the Taste to produce this exact response in a specific fraction of the affected lives, because the suicides were a flavor in their own right.

Some of the audience members had a specific appreciation for the aftermath, and the Painter had refined the aftermath as part of the feast.

Many others did not end their lives. Many others lived. The living ones, the Painter had refined as well; their living, with the wreckage their bodies had made of their loved ones and countless others over the ages, was its own slow flavor, savored by audience members, across the long span of those lives.

The Painter had built the course to feed many tiers at once.

It had succeeded.

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