Published at 6th of July 2026 6:57 am

Chapter 2242: Breaking The Rules

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Prime had moved into the time layers the Painter had finished with, since he was a being that could access the substrate even as a ninth-dimensional entity that was infinitely closer to the tenth dimension.

Prime had moved into the past slowly. He could have gone much faster, but there could not be any avenue for mistake, because the moment that the Painter knew it was there, then it would be eliminated instantly.

To avoid detection, Eos could not help him, even if he fell into danger, and so Prime’s journey had taken him to some of the most mysterious locations that even Eos had not seen.

The past was made of fog; there was barely anything to be found, as the hunger of the Painter was all encompassing... but even a creature like that had things it did not want to consume, and it was those traces that Prime followed; however, even he would not be able to accomplish this without the help of another person.

The Painter, when it gave Eos a seat at the board on the Tower’s lowest tier of relevant time, had not considered that the seat was a connection, and the connection, traced backward through Eos’s bloodlines, gave one of Eos’s avatars access to the foundation-strata of the Tower.

Prime had gone there through Kronos and walked the sequence backward, then he had reached Kairos and waited at the moments the Painter had treated as decisive, and watched the Painter’s old hand make the decisive moves; Prime had stepped into Aevum and stretched there, durably, while the Painter served courses elsewhere; and then he had touched Aeon and held the Tower in the edge of an attention the Painter could not feel because the Painter was not in those layers anymore.

What Prime had been doing was unwriting. Prime had been finding the small foundational decisions the Painter had made in those finished time layers.

These were the decisions that defined what the Tower was made of, what the Tower’s audience was made of, what the Tower’s medium was, and Prime had been quietly drawing those decisions out and replacing them with decisions of Eos’s making.

Decisions that looked, from the Painter’s vantage in the relevant time-layer, identical. Decisions that responded, in the lower strata, to a different signature.

Prime had unwritten across the entire second age trillions of decisions, but he had not unwritten enough to make the Tower respond differently to the Painter; the Painter still owned the Tower in every visible sense. But the Tower’s foundation now responded to a second signature, layered beneath the Painter’s, and the second signature was Eos’s, and the second signature had been written into time layers the Painter would not return to to check.

The Tower’s foundation, by the start of the third age, was a shared foundation, and the Painter did not know.

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In a chamber of the Eternal Tower’s substrate, in the meat of the Tower’s body, the place where the Tower’s flesh, if a Tower could be said to have flesh, was made, Serathis had been working.

Serathis was also an avatar of Eos’s bloodline, but unlike her brother, Serathis’s presence was almost unknown across the ages, and except for two Primordials who knew of her Existence and how much she had changed Existence by her actions, most did not know about her.

Serathis was able to work directly with the substrate of the Tower, because while Chronomancer Prime had reached the ninth layer of his Origin... Serathis had reached the tenth!

The only reason she had not ascended to become a proto-tenth dimensional being was because the commotion of her ascension would draw the attention of the Painter.

It was better for her to work in secret.

The Painter had always believed that only one tenth-dimensional being could rise from Existence, and it was right, but the influence of Eos went beyond what this being could predict, and he was the great wave that rose the waters.

By his presence alone... everything changes.

Serathis did not work in time. Serathis worked in flesh. Where Prime had unwritten foundational decisions in the Tower’s past time-layers, Serathis had altered the Tower’s substrate in the present, by a method the Painter had not anticipated because the method required a kind of patience the Painter had not cataloged.

Serathis had been eating the Tower.

Eating, in the sense that Serathis’s bloodline could absorb a portion of any substance into its own body and produce, on the other side, the same substance with a different signature.

This was in the same way a tree absorbs water and produces tree-substance that is no longer water.

Serathis had been doing this for the duration of the second age, in tiny increments, in regions of the Tower the Painter never inspected because the Painter assumed its Tower’s substance was its own.

The Tower’s flesh, by the start of the third age, was no longer entirely the Painter’s medium. Significant portions of it had become Serathis’s medium, signed with Eos’s signature, while continuing to look and behave, to casual or even attentive inspection, like the Painter’s substance.

Serathis had been thorough, and she had not bothered with the visible chambers the Painter passed through daily. Serathis had worked on the Tower’s deep flesh, the load-bearing strata, the architectural roots, and by the start of the third age, Serathis had become one of the foundations of the Eternal Tower, but the Painter, focused on the destruction of the Origin Tree, did not know this.

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At the board, Eos turned his hand, and what he turned was not a piece on the board but the board’s relationship to the Tower beneath it.

The Painter felt the shift.

This being who could be said could not be shocked, now felt something it had not felt before.

It felt the floor of the room shift slightly under its feet and recognized that the floor had not been quite the floor it remembered for some time.

The Painter looked down at the Tower beneath the board before it glanced at the substrate of the medium in which the game was being played.

Then, to its greatest shock, it found that it could not entirely read what it was looking at.

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