The first age ended somewhere around the four hundred and seventy billion Cosmic Eras, and it ended without any single dramatic event.

This was the most important thing about it, and was what Eos had been planning for, because he needed this time to figure out the game and how to play it well.

To do that, he slowed down the pace of the game and became more familiar with his abilities at the tenth-dimensional level.

The Painter had spent the first age trying to engineer a dramatic event, a delta of meaning that would reorganize the game in its favor, and Eos had spent the first age refusing to allow one.

Every time the Painter set a piece in motion that would have produced a great moment of reckoning in some world or some civilization, Eos arrived just before the reckoning with a small unannounced adjustment, a kindness, a coincidence, a useful detail in the right conversation at the right time, that softened the reckoning into a story rather than a catastrophe.

The Painter watched twelve thousand civilizations not collapse in ways the Painter had carefully prepared for, and in not collapsing, the civilizations also did not become the spectacles they would have been.

However, it was inevitable that the Painter, by the end of the first age, had begun to adapt.

This was the development Eos had feared and had also expected.

The Painter was not stupid. The Painter had, in the course of the first age, slowly come to understand the shape of Eos’s game, and had begun to adjust its own play accordingly.

It had, in the last hundred billion Cosmic Era years of the age, started to seed small unannounced cruelties, not the great deltas, which Eos was now defending against, but the small unexpressive griefs that mirrored Eos’s small unexpressive joys.

It had seen the remarkable achievements made by Eos when he focused on the small things and understood that this was one of Eos’s greatest strengths, the fact that he was born a mortal and therefore knew how much strengths were in the hearts of these fragile beings.

A child in a world on the eight-quintillion branch found, one ordinary afternoon, that she was no longer interested in the game she had been playing for years. She put it down and did not pick it up again. She did not become unhappy. She simply, in some small interior way, closed.

The Painter had nudged her closed and Eos had not seen the nudge in time to prevent it.

The Painter saw this pattern, learned, and began to adapt it into its tactics. Among the many things that the Painter was, it had always been a fast learner.

However, by the end of the first age, the game was no longer Eos’s to lose by default.

The first age was ending, and with the foresight of these two tenth-dimensional beings, the second age would be the slow contest of two players who had each forced the other to play at the level of the small, and who would now spend the next many trillions of Cosmic Eras discovering what could be done at that level, and how much could be lost.

However, Eos was not one who was always patient; there were many times that he had won victories because he decided to flip the board and change the rules.

He had watched and studied this game for a long time, and now he believed that he had seen a loophole that the Painter had missed, and he kept this discovery inside his heart as he carefully watched the Painter throughout the first age, waiting for the next age to begin.

Then he struck.

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In the four hundred and seventy billion Cosmic Era, in a world that was old by then, not by the standards of Existence but by the standards of its own inhabitants, who had been there for tens of quadrillions of generations and had built and lost and rebuilt their civilizations a billion times over, a child was born.

She was nothing remarkable, healthy, with two parents who loved her in the particular ordinary way that two parents love a healthy first child. She grew, walked, and spoke at the usual age. She was bright but not extraordinary. She would not, in any other Existence, have been a piece worth moving.

In her ninth year, while sitting alone by a stream that ran past her mother’s farm, she looked up at the sky and asked a question.

She asked it of no one. She did not know why she had asked it.

The question was: "Who is watching?"

It was a small question, asked aloud to no one, by a nine-year-old child sitting beside a stream in a world four hundred billion Cosmic Era into the long move.

It was the first question of its kind asked in any new world of the Origin Tree.

The Painter heard it, and Eos heard it, causing him to smile secretly inside his heart.

Both of them, at the table in the room at the top of the Eternal Tower, paused in mid-move and looked, very carefully, at the same small piece on the board, and for the first time since the long move began, they made eye contact across the board. 𝑓𝑟𝑒𝘦𝓌𝑒𝑏𝑛𝑜𝘷𝑒𝘭.𝒸𝘰𝑚

The Painter’s voice, when it spoke, was not amused, and not brisk, and not warm.

"Eos," it said.

"Yes," Eos said.

"You have remembered that this is what ends Existences?"

He relped with a single word, "Yes."

"And yet, you have deliberately permitted this to happen."

As if savoring the word, Eos nodded, "I have."

The Painter was silent for a long moment. "Then," it said quietly, "the second age begins, and I withdraw my offer of suppression."

"I know," Eos said, "It was never an offer I would ever accept in the first place."

A dark aura exploded from the Painter and receded almost as quickly as it had arrived, and it whispered, "What I will now do to you, I have not done in any Existence before."

Eos cocked his head to the side, and he nodded, "I know that too."

"And you have permitted this."

Without flinching, he nodded, "Yes."

"Why?"