Published at 14th of July 2026 8:07 am

Chapter 2256: Kneel! Kneel! Kneel!

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The Painter tore pieces of audience off its body, and the pieces came with pieces of the Painter, because the grafting did not separate cleanly as the grafting was not separable.

The Painter screamed, and the screaming was the first sound the Painter had ever produced that was not curated for the audience’s reception. The screaming was raw, and it was for the Painter’s own benefit, addressed to no one, performed for no audience, because the Painter had never had a private moment in its existence and now had one, and the private moment was agony.

The audience, even as it was torn from the Painter’s body, continued to eat.

The pieces of the audience that had been removed from the Painter were still hungry. They reached, with mouths that had multiplied along their bodies in anticipation of this meal, and they bit into the Painter’s hands as the Painter tried to remove them.

"Ahhh... You bastards! How dare you all! I am to feed you not the food! Stop!"

The Painter felt its hands being eaten, and its body being eaten, and it felt the flesh of the seats, the marrow of the amphitheater itself, being chewed by the very beings who had been seated in it.

The amphitheater was eating itself.

The Painter understood, in this moment, that the audience had no more capacity to recognize the Painter than to recognize itself. The audience was hunger without recognition. The audience had been hunger without recognition for the entire history of the Painter’s service, and the Painter had not noticed because the hunger had always been directed outward at the meals the Painter brought.

With the meal being the Painter, the hunger had not changed direction; the hunger had simply consumed what was in front of it, which was the Painter, and which was the audience itself, and which was no longer distinguishable from the Painter or from the audience.

Eos’ essence was of the Ouroboros Serpent, and he had recognized a bit of their essence in the Painter and its audience. They were not the same, his serpents had a symbiotic relationship with their essence, but the Painter was wrong on so many fundamental level, and Eos saw that flaw and he took it.

Any other being may have hesitated, but the moment Eos saw the audience in the Painter’s face, he knew this was the way he had to follow.

The Painter, in agony, turned to Eos, and he blamed!

The Painter’s rage, which had not previously had a face, found a face.

And that face smirked at it.

Eos had introduced the flavor, and had served the grief. This forbidden fruit was given to the Painter and led to its Eos tears. The audience was eating the Painter because Eos had served grief, and grief had been the flavor that produced the tears, and the tears had been the substance that taught the audience to reach inward through the grafting.

Eos had to be unmade.

The Painter, in the eleventh dimension, turned its full extension toward Eos at the board, and it attacked.

Its attack was a force, the kind of force a being that had spent millions of Existences disciplining itself into curatorial decorum had never had occasion to use, and the force was the eleventh-dimensional weight of a being that had been compressing itself into the tenth dimension as a courtesy for the duration of the game.

The Painter dropped the courtesy, as every hand the Painter had, that was sprouting from every point of the Painter’s body where pain was registering, reached towards Eos to attack him.

These hands were not designed to attack because the Painter had never attacked anything, but in its rage, it no longer cared.

The hands were the size of galactic clusters when they began the reach, by the time they crossed the board they were the size of small universes, by the time they reached Eos they were the size of Existences.

And yet, Eos did not move.

Eos had been standing at the board with his hand open, offering grief, since the moment the audience had begun to eat the Painter’s tears. He had not lowered his hand, and so the grief was still rising from the Tree’s roots, the true memories were still flowing, the song of the Tree was still being sung across infinite branches.

The Painter’s hands arrived, and struck Eos, and a massive shockwave exceeding the tenth dimension rippled through the room, and the board began to implode, and the destruction tore through the entire room, causing a cyclone of destruction that would have unmade Primordials and Luminious in the blink of an eye.

This attack was the first physical contact between Eos and the Painter in the entire history of the game. The board had been the only contact between them for two ages. Now the board was broken, the table was shattered, the chair the Painter had crafted for Eos was unmade in a single moment of the Painter’s reach.

"You broken creature... You are food! How dare you break the sanctity of my body!"

The Painter’s hands closed on Eos’s body and squeezed, and the force from its hands was a pressure the tenth dimension had never been required to withstand, and Eos’s body began to give, causing him to bleed.

Eos’s blood was the substance of Eos’s tenth-dimensional being, the medium of his Telos, leaking from the points where the Painter’s eleventh-dimensional hands were tearing him.

Where his blood fell, it fell onto Serathis’s substrate, and Serathis’s substrate received it, causing the substrate to begin to change under Eos’s blood, taking on properties the substrate had not previously had, but the change was not fast enough to stop the bleeding.

Eos’s body bent in the Painter’s grip, twisting in shapes that were unnatural, and yet he did not lower his hand that held the grief, the small hand, the mortal hand under the tenth-dimensional light, remained open, palm up, offering.

The Painter saw this, and its rage deepened.

"You will not stand," the Painter screamed, and the screaming carried across the substrate of every dimension. "You will kneel. You will be the meal. You will be what every cultivator has been. Kneel, my forty-fourth, my impossible thing, my unrepeatable cook... kneel. Kneel. KNEEL."

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