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Eternal Abomination (Web Novel) - Chapter 2257: Reaching The Final Step
Chapter 2257: Reaching The Final Step
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The roar of the Painter carried with it such power that nothing and no one in all of creation could have resisted its voice, but Eos did not kneel.When words failed, the Painter began to apply force.
The Painter’s infinite hands pulled, each carrying the weight of millions of Existences. They pulled with the weight of forty-three previous cultivators who had all knelt at this point in their respective games.
All of this was accompanied by the power of an eleventh-dimensional being who had not been required to pull on anything in its entire existence and was now pulling with everything it had.
And still yet, Eos did not kneel.
He bent, bled, and the substance of his being leaked into the substrate around him. He went to one knee, and the Painter saw the knee touch the substrate and screamed in triumph that lasted half a second, because then Eos stood again, and he stood with the hand still open, the grief still offered.
Standing for the second time was harder than almost anything he had done, and Eos did it anyway.
"I have stood," Eos whispered, and the voice was strained.
This was the first time the Painter had ever heard Eos’s voice strain, and the strain was a flavor the Painter would have catalogued in any other moment but did not catalogue now because the Painter was no longer cataloguing.
"I will continue to stand. You may tear the body, but my Will is my body, and it is unbreakable."
"Kneel," the Painter screamed.
"No," Eos said.
And the Painter, in rage, did not see what was happening behind it.
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Andar had been walking for a thousand years.
He had been walking on a substrate that thinned with every step. The boundary between the Tower’s substrate and the Tree’s substrate was the thinnest substrate in existence, and Andar had reached the place where the boundary was almost not there, and he had stopped walking, because there was nowhere left to walk.
He stood at the threshold.
The threshold was the moment of crossing, the substrate-instant at which a being either was or was not in the Tower.
Andar was not in the Tower since he had not been able to cross because his being was not yet calibrated to the substrate the Tower stood in.
The calibration had been deepening for a thousand years, as the time he had spent walking along this path had been a form of calibration.
Every step had been Andar’s substance adjusting, slowly, to the Tower’s substrate, becoming the kind of substance that could exist in the Tower without being unmade by the Tower’s medium.
Andar had been at the tenth layer of his Origin for the last hundred years of the walk. The last hundred years had been spent at the threshold itself, not advancing, because there was nowhere to advance to.
He could not cross at the tenth layer of his Origin. Crossing required proto-tenth-dimensional ascension.
Andar could not push because pushing would surface his substance to the Painter’s perimeter sensors, and the sensors of an eleventh-dimensional being were vast, and Andar’s pushing would be felt across the Grand Void.
This would inevitably draw the Painter’s attention, and Andar would be unmade in the moment of pushing.
So he had stood at the threshold for a hundred years, ready to push, unable to push, waiting.
The Painter’s attention had been on Eos throughout the second age and into the third. But the attention had also been on Andar, in a small, constant background-monitoring way, because the Painter’s attention had always covered the entirety of its perimeter, and Andar had been on the perimeter for a thousand years.
Andar had felt the background-monitoring like a faint thread of perception that touched him every few hundred years, just enough to confirm he was still where he had been, still not crossing.
He had endured this monitoring by being entirely still in the substrate, the way a held breath is still.
Suddenly, the monitoring stopped, and Andar felt the Painter’s attention, which had been distributed across its perimeter with one small thread on Andar at the threshold, had just pulled.
The pulling concentrated the Painter’s entire attention on a single point, Eos at the board, with the Painter’s hands on him, and the perimeter monitoring went dark, all of it, every thread.
Andar had a window. He did not know how long the window would last. He did not know if the window was a trap, a feint, a deliberate uncovering meant to draw him into pushing. He did not know whether Eos was alive or dying. He did not know whether his father needed him at the Tower or whether his father was already past needing.
He knew only that the window was open and that the wooden bird over his heart was warm and that Mira was waiting for him, and that he, Andar Erikson, had decided, on the day he left the house, that he would push when the window came, regardless of what the window meant.
Andar pushed.
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The push was a sound the substrate had never carried.
Andar’s substance, which had been calibrating for a thousand years to the Tower’s substrate, began to exceed the calibration.
The substance reached past the tenth layer of Origin into a layer that was not part of Origin’s architecture at all, a layer that existed only because beings sometimes pushed past where their substance was supposed to stop, and the layer caught Andar and offered itself.
The layer was proto-tenth-dimensional.
It was not the tenth dimension. It was the step, the asymptote that Prime had been holding for a Cosmic Era.
The step was the substance of becoming, the substance that allowed a being to cross from ninth-into-tenth without being either, the substance of threshold.
Andar entered the step.
The step did not welcome him. The step required of any being that entered it, a toll. The step had not been built by Eos or by the Painter. The step had been built by the substrate itself, in the long ages before Origin had a name, as the natural mechanism by which beings transitioned between dimensions, and the natural mechanism required the same payment from every being that used it: a part of the being itself, given up to the step, retained by the step as the cost of the crossing.
