"What did you just do?" Eos said. He kept his voice level, even though this was the last thing he wanted to do.

"I moved a piece," the Painter said. "The piece I moved is a very old one. It is called Erosion. It was my first employee. It has been asleep since I no longer needed it, but it remembers its work. I have set it as a small task. A slow task. Your outermost worlds, the youngest ones, the ones just bloomed this hour, Erosion will begin, from the seam I just opened, the quiet work of making them forget they were ever meant for anything. They will not die, but they will simply stop reaching for you. They would stop yearning for Telos, becoming lazy and decadent. In about an era of your time, they will be smooth, unshaped." The hand of the Painter shifted, and Eos thought that this almost resembled a smile, "They would be beautiful, in a way. Finished."

"That is my piece you are moving against."

"That is your piece I am moving against. Yes. And it is your turn."

Eos looked at the board. 𝕗𝗿𝕖𝐞𝐰𝗲𝕓𝐧𝕠𝕧𝗲𝐥.𝚌𝐨𝚖

He looked at the seam, at the quiet frequency leaking from it, at the outermost worlds of the Origin Tree shivering under a pressure that most of their inhabitants could not yet feel.

He looked at the Painter.

"And when I move," he said, "I move against your pieces."

"Yes."

"Which are?"

The Painter settled back in its chair.

"Whatever you can find," it said amiably. "Whatever is mine. The habits of End that persist in the substrate. The ideologies I have seeded in dead Existences that still whisper in the bones of the Grand Void. The small, quiet loyalties of things that have served me for so long that they cannot imagine serving anything else. There are many. You will discover them as you play. I will not make a list. It would spoil the art."

"Art."

"The game is an art," the Painter said, with the calm of a man stating an obvious professional fact. "It is the oldest art. Older than creation, actually, because you cannot create without first having defined what it would mean to lose what you created, and loss is an aesthetic decision. I was an artist before I was a creator. I remain one."

Eos was silent.

Then he said, quietly: "Tell me about the first Existence. Origin believes it remembers it, but I know that something is missing. In my memories, there are not forty-three pieces missing, there are forty-four."

The Painter went still. It was not a long stillness. A breath, no more. But it was stillness, and Eos had been watching for it, and he watched it pass through the shrouded form the way a ripple passes through dark water.

"Why do you want to know that?" the Painter said. The pleasantness was, for the first time, slightly thinner.

"Because every other thing I have fought in this war has traced its shape, somewhere, to the first Existence," Eos said. "Because Enoch carried it. Because I suspect everything that led to something like you existing was born from the shattering that happened in it. Because I believe that whatever you are afraid of sits inside that memory. And because if I am going to play this game with you, I would prefer to do it with the piece of information you have never allowed any of the forty-three to have."

"They asked," the Painter said, after a moment.

"Did they?"

"You are not the only perceptive one, Eos... Each of them found traces of this, eventually. I told each of them a story. Different stories. I am good at stories. Although they only know how to ask after they have been defeated, and you are the first to ask before the game begins."

"Which story are you going to tell me?"

The Painter regarded him for a long, silent moment.

Then, very quietly, more quietly than it had spoken since Eos entered the room, it said:

"The true one."

Eos did not move, aware that every word said by the Painter a moment before was meant to throw him off, but he held the Will of Truth, and would the Painter be able to deceive even him?

"I will tell you the true one," the Painter said, "because I want to. Not because you have earned it. You have not earned it. I have decided I would like to hear it aloud, once, before this game is played, so that there can be a witness who is not me. You happen to be the witness available. Do not mistake it for respect."

"I do not."

"Good."

The Painter folded its shrouded hands on the table.

"The first Existence," it said, "was not a garden. I don’t know why most would see it that way."

"Who saw it that way?" Eos asked, and again there was that feeling that the Painter was smiling, and then it vanished, and this being began its story.

"Before the first Existence, there was no void. There was no dark. There was no nothing, because nothing is still a kind of space, and there was not even space. There was only attention... a single sustained attention, without direction, without object. I was that attention, although I was not called anything then, because there was nothing to call me and no one to call me it. I simply noticed. For what you would call an eternity, I noticed, and the noticing was the whole of what there was."

"Eventually," it said, "I grew bored."

Eos said nothing.

"You must understand," the Painter continued, "that boredom at my level is not the boredom of a mortal on a long afternoon. Boredom at my level is geometry. It is a structural fact about a consciousness that has exhausted its own surface area. I noticed that I was noticing. Then I noticed that I was noticing that I was noticing. Then I noticed that I had been doing this for so long that the noticing had begun to fold in on itself, and the folds had begun to generate edges, and the edges had begun to differentiate. From the edges came the first dimensions. From the dimensions came the first possibilities for content. From the possibilities for content came, at last, the first thing that was not me."

"The first Existence," Eos said.

"The first Existence," the Painter agreed. "It was not a garden. I have told three of the forty-three that it was a garden. It made them feel kindly toward me. It was useful. It was a lie. A garden implies tending. A garden implies love. What I made was not a garden."

"What was it?"

"A spectacle."

The Painter let the word sit.

"The first Existence," it continued, "was an amphitheater. A single vast amphitheater made of the first matter, suspended in the first of what would later be called voids. The amphitheater had a floor, and the floor had things on it, and the things were the first beings, the first living things, the first thinking things, the first things capable of pain. I had made them that way. Specifically. I had designed them to feel, as richly and finely as my newly-folded attention could render. And I had placed them on the floor of the amphitheater, and I had seated myself in the stands, and I had watched them."

"Watched them do what?"

"Whatever they did."

"Which was."

"Everything," the Painter said.