The third age was a thousand years old, and the Painter sat in silence for all those years. The Eternal Tower was shaking, and the final words spoken between it and Eos were being held in the air, kept from dissipating by the attention of the Painter.
"Will you continue to bear it?" the Painter had chuckled. "You would attack me while I ravage your creation?"
"Yes," Eos had said. "I will continue to bear, and I will also begin my attack, for nowhere in the rules of the game was I prevented from doing this."
The audience, in its face, was whispering to each other furiously. The Painter’s present state was strange; this was the first time from the moment it became aware that it felt this strange emotion inside itself, and the audience in its face was observing the Painter with the same voracious appetite they used in observing Eos.
After a while, the Painter grinned... it had no face, but it was grinning, and at this moment, the Painter became beautiful. It reached towards the words above the board, and it dismissed them into smoke.
The Painter had been beautiful before; it considered itself to be always beautiful, but the beauty had been the beauty of restraint; it was the dark shroud that hid what was hungry behind a presentable surface.
A thousand years in the third age, the restraint left, and the Painter’s beauty became the beauty of an open mouth lined with teeth.
The Painter did not show its true self to the contestant, not until the game was nearing its end, because it had learned after many painful failures that knowledge of its true self quickly led the contestant playing against it to madness and despair, and from that moment, a large part of the game had lost its meaning.
However, the Painter now realized that treating Eos like the other contestant had become its greatest mistake, and holding back against his... opponent was a mistake, if there was anyone in all creation that would appreciate its beauty, it would be Eos... It could play the greatest game of its life, and it would not need to hide itself to do that.
The Painter laughed, and the laugh came from somewhere lower than its mouth... But it had never had a mouth.
"Forty-fourth," the Painter sang. "Forty-fourth, forty-fourth. My little forty-fourth. Architect of the second signature. Beloved. My forty-third was unimpressive at the end. Did I tell you? I have not. Permit me. The forty-third made a small art-object out of the blood of his lovers and tried to hide it inside his own skull, and I found it there in the second course, and I removed it with a single thought, and the forty-third wept, and the weeping was inadequate, and I did not finish the meal because the meal had become flavorless. The tier that had ordered the forty-third was disappointed and asked for an extra course, and I provided it from another Existence’s stock. Do you see? Do you see, my forty-fourth? You are not the first to try. You are the first I have not yet been able to remove."
Eos did not respond. What could he say to something like that? However, he knew that this game had just entered dangerous territory where nothing could be held back. He had anticipated something like this happening the moment he began to move against the Eternal Tower.
The last thing you wanted to show a tyrant was the rot underneath their throne, and he had just shown the Painter that it was not in an unassailable position, and he expected the Painter to fight like a cornered beast.
The Painter rose, slowly, from the position it had occupied across the board for many ages, and as it rose, the audience in its face rose with it, because the audience did not occupy the Painter; the audience was the Painter’s circulatory system, and they rose because the body did.
The amphitheater unfolded outward into the Grand Void, and from the Origin Tree, looking up, you could see an architecture so massive that it dwarfed the entirety of the Great Tower.
The sheer scale of it, the height of it, the impossible deepening of the tiers, the fact that the audience members the Painter served were not seated but grafted, growing out of the seat-substance like organs from a body, the seats not furniture but flesh.
This was the Painter’s full extension. This was what had been compressed, across all forty-three previous Existences, into the curatorial figure across the board. The compression had been an act of decorum. The decorum was now over.
Recall that the Origin Tree was impossibly massive, its full size one that a Primordial would never see all of its for all eternity, because no matter how fast they travelled, the Origin Tree was infinite in their perception, and the Eternal Tower, in a conservative estimate, dwarfed the Origin Tree hundreds of times, and now the full unveiling of the Painter’s face made the Eternal Tower as small as a grain of sand.
"Watch," the Painter said.
The Painter raised its hands, the hands not at the wrists but at every point of its body where a hand could be made, and many hands were made.
Most of the hands were not human in shape, and many of them held things. What they held were the flavors the Painter had not served in any of the forty-three previous Existences, because the flavors had been waiting, the audience that ate these flavors had been waiting, and the wait had been so long that the audience members in the relevant tiers had begun to develop secondary mouths along their lengths, and the secondary mouths were now opening.
"I will serve all of them," the Painter screamed, and the entirety of the Grand Void reverberated. "All of them. Every appetite. The seven thousand and seventeenth tier, yes, but also the seventy-thousandth, the seven-millionth, even that tier I have been keeping in reserve for an Existence I judged sufficient. You are sufficient, my forty-fourth. You are more than sufficient. I will serve every flavor I have, simultaneously, across your infinite Tree."
The Painter spread out its infinite number of arms and proclaimed to all substrates of the tenth dimension,
"You have hidden them well, but every god in your Tree will be tasted. Every demon. Every fallen one. Every risen one. Every named being in every pantheon. Every nameless thing in every empty corner. Every consciousness, every will, every cherished creation, every thing that thinks itself a thing. I will serve all of them in this Cosmic Era. I will give the audience everything they have ever wanted and never been given. The meal will last as long as your reshaping holds, and when your reshaping is overwhelmed by the volume, which it will be, the audience will eat what arrives unaltered, and the unaltered flavors will be the most exquisite course in the history of my service. Do you understand? Do you understand, my beloved? The volume is the move. The volume is what your direction-inversion cannot hold. I do not need to defeat your alteration. I need only to exceed it."