Eos folded his hands on the table, and he looked directly into the shrouded space where the Painter’s eyes would have been if the Painter had permitted itself to be seen.

"Because the first Existence’s beings asked the same question," he said. "And you broke them for it. And every Existence since has been built around the constraint of preventing them from ever asking it again. And I have decided that the next Existence, the one that will follow this game, whoever wins it, will be one in which the question is permitted to be asked. By a child, a stream, a world, in any world, in every world."

"Because the beings on the floor have a right to know that there is someone in the stands. And because if you destroy this Existence to prevent that knowledge, then I will rebuild it, and you will destroy it again, and I will rebuild it, and so on, until either you finally stop or the dimension itself decides that your prevention is the thing that needs to be removed from the geometry of purpose. And I am willing to wait that long. I have arrived, and I have nowhere to be."

The Painter did not answer for a very long time. This being had possessed a great amount of control at the start of this game, and now that control slipped for a moment before it regained it.

Perhaps he had made a mistake by pushing forward such a drastic move so early, but Eos always believed in shaking the mindset of his opponents and making moves that they were not aware of.

After the Painter ended the first Existence because they were aware of it, from that moment, it had never revealed itself to any life, even the Luminious only knew this creature as the Great One, and even Eos, referring to it as the Painter, was not its real name.

Even though it told Eos that it restricted all Existence from knowing of its presence because it ruined the fun for it, Eos thought that there must be more behind this action. 𝗳𝚛𝚎𝚎𝘄𝕖𝕓𝕟𝕠𝚟𝚎𝕝.𝗰𝕠𝐦

He refused to believe that the Painter suppressed its presence for this alone, and this move that he made was to force the Painter to either reveal itself or take an action that it had never done before.

Any way this played out would still profit him in the end.

Eos did not wait long for the Painter to respond, and it did this with a gesture.

It reached out, with one shrouded hand, and on the board it lifted a piece, and it set the piece down with a small, definite click that echoed across the Grand Void and was heard, faintly, in every world on every branch of the Origin Tree.

The piece it had moved was a piece no one had known was on the board.

Eos’s eyes lit up, as this move alone had exposed one of the most hidden hands of the Painter.

The board was rigged!

Eos knew this, the Painter also knew it, but the challenge here was that these loopholes were hidden in plain sight, and if Eos could not find them, then it was his problem.

There was no way the Painter had won these battles so many times just by its brilliance alone. There were certain measures it could have taken to suppress Eos before this game even began, and the fact that it had given Eos the chance to familiarize himself with the board meant the Painter was confident in its preparation that it did not think it would matter.

Eos observed this move closely, watching the way the Painter had twisted the dimension of purpose to hide its plans, and by this act alone, this move would no longer be able to work anymore.

The piece the Painter took out had been waiting since before the first Existence was built.

This was the open secret that was placed on the board. The Painter had erased everything before the first Existence, since it was the only one who would be able to recognize and understand what came before the first Existence.

Eos’s Telos was born from the fusion of Origin and Truth, and while this gave him many unique advantages, it was also restricted in the sense that Eos did not know anything that Origin did not know.

Origin did not exist when the Painter was born, if this creature had ever been born. In that Era, Eos did not know the truth of what happened; he did not know if the Painter was the only one of its kind, and it did not know the sort of power that was present even before Existence was born.

If he did not know these things, then even if they were present before his eyes, he would not recognize them, and this was the method the Painter had used in all of its victories.

It could lead its opponents into traps, and they would think they were approaching victory.

What the Painter revealed was a piece it had reserved for the eventuality that any one of its forty-four arrivals would force the question.

It was the piece called The Cancellation.

From this piece, Eos was finally able to see a brief glimpse of how the Luminious was created, and most importantly, he was able to finally decipher one of the strangest power systems he had ever come across, Lumina.

The Painter sent out The Cancellation and the second age of the long move began with the slow, quiet, total redrawing of every map any being in Existence had ever drawn of the geometry of the creation, because The Cancellation, once placed unanswered everything.

It went through the substrate of Existence and found every place where a question had been recently asked, and it closed the asking.

The child by the stream would never ask the question again. Her descendants would not ask it. Her language would slowly lose the words for asking it. Across a million trillion worlds, The Cancellation would move with the patience of a glacier and would smooth over the next ten billion Cosmic Eras, the entire faculty of asking who watches out of the cognitive structure of mortal beings.

It would not kill anyone; it would simply unmake the question.