As the Painter was speaking, the Audience in its face, each of them the size of the Origin Tree, began to spit their poison... their flavor into its infinite hands, and he cupped them in its palm.
The entirety of the Grand Void was reverberating with the weight of the flavor that was erupting from the body of the Painter.
Eos expected something... but even his vast mind could not expect this... the Painter was not in the tenth dimension... it was in the eleventh!
In many ways, he thought that the tenth dimension was the last; there could not be anything deeper than the Substrates. However, while that may be the case, he forgot to account for the fact that quantitative improvements could lead to qualitative changes.
The Painter had spent such a long time gathering power in the tenth dimensional substrate and had therefore grown to the extent that it had long surpassed what a tenth dimensional being could be, and like a caterpillar transforming into a butterfly, the Painter reached the eleventh dimension.
It did not earn this power by seeking it; the Painter just naturally grew into it as a side effect of its nature.
It was the first being to ever live, and time had always been on its side.
The Painter’s many hands released the flavors, and Eos could not hold this; he could only endure the weight of all evils descending on what seemed like all of the Grand Void. The flavors flooded into the Tower’s substrate, even as they descended into the Tree’s substrate, and propagated.
Ⓟ
It was easy to forget that the Origin Tree was infinite and contained a myriad of races and powers when the eyes were focused on the Primordials, the most powerful beings inside Existence, and now that the Painter was no longer focusing on taking in small measures, all races, both mortal and immortal, felt the flavor of its endless hunger.
The feeding has begun.
In the realm of Vethaureth, the dragon-empress who had ruled a galactic chain for nine Cosmic Eras felt, for the first time in her existence, something inside her power.
She had been the size of a small universe; her wings had been made of folded star-systems; her breath had been the laws of fire that her dominions taught their children.
In time, the dragon-empress would reach the level of Primordial, and her reign would lead to the first major war that would sweep across one of the branches of the Origin Tree.
This was what the future was supposed to be, but one of the Painter’s flavors fell on her realm and corrupted her soul, and this flavor specified that she would devour her own brood, every drake, every wyrm, every offspring of her nine-Era reign, with the full awareness that she was unmaking her own continuation.
The flavor was old and had been waiting for her since she first took the throne.
The flavor reshaped.
What was expressed, in Vethaureth, was the recognition of every offspring she had ever made, all at once, with the full awareness of who they had become. Wyrms she had not seen in seven Cosmic Eras lifted their heads, across the galactic chain, and felt their mother’s regard for the first time.
Drakes who had wandered into smaller dominions felt the recognition reach them across the Grand Void.
The dragon-empress, in her throne-galaxy, opened her mouth to scream the inherited cruelty and instead named her children.
She named all of them, even though her cries caused her throat to bleed, and her blood drowned galaxies. The naming took half a Cosmic Era, and the audience tasted every drop of pain that was inside her voice.
In the screaming pits of Akravoss, twelve thousand layered hells where demons had been refining the architecture of cruelty since the first age of the new Existence, the demon-king Mor-Aglith felt the flavor enter him.
He had been promised, in the ancient compact with the Painter’s reservoir, that he would be the engine of his own desecration: he would feel, in his full awareness, every torment he had ever inflicted, refracted back through his own substrate, until his demonhood collapsed into the screaming of the screamed-upon.
The reshaping caught the flavor and turned it. Mor-Aglith felt every torment he had inflicted, but felt them as the victims had felt them, with the victim’s clarity, with the victim’s appeal. The screaming pits, for the first time in their history, paused.
Demons across the twelve thousand layers, mid-act, looked at what they were doing. They did not stop, because demons do not stop. But they saw.
In the heaven-realm of Lumithea, where seventy thousand archangels sang the ascendance-hymns that maintained the cosmic ordering of light, the choir-prime Vasiliel felt the flavor as a pressure on her larynx.
She was to sing, at the Painter’s specification, the hymn that would unmake her sisters, the disordering-song, the cantata of dissolution that had been written in the long-before, that had never been sung because the singing required a choir-prime who would conduct it knowingly. Vasiliel raised her hands, and she began.
The reshaping caught the song between her larynx and her mouth, and what came out was not the disordering-song. What came out was a cantata that had not previously existed in Lumithea’s repertoire, because Lumithea’s repertoire had been calibrated to maintenance, not to increase, and the song that came out was the song of more light than the cosmos had been designed to carry.
The seventy thousand archangels heard the new song and joined it without choice, because the song was the song their choir-architecture had been built to perform if such a song ever existed, and the song existed now.
Lumithea brightened. Adjacent realms brightened. The Origin Tree, in the regions that bordered Lumithea, grew briefly visible to itself, branches seeing branches, in the new light, for the first time.
In the abyssal solitudes where Krynnex-Of-No-Memory had been swimming for nine Grand Cosmic Eras, devouring its own past hour by hour to remain sufficient to its appetites, the flavor reached it and specified a final consumption: it would devour its own present, ending the long swim in a single instant of self-cessation.