THE GRAND VOID
The invitation was open, and Eos was not a person who ran away from a challenge, no matter the size of it, and he turned toward the Eternal Tower.
He had taken exactly one step when he stopped.
Eos did not stop because he was suddenly afraid of what was to co, but a small internal shift had just happened inside of him, the kind of shift a mother feels in the mont a child decides to be born. Sowhere beneath the threshold of what he would have called his core, his evolution had finished its work.
The fusion was complete.
He stood for a long mont with his foot still slightly raised, the Origin Tree rising behind him and the Tower in the distance watching, and he considered the two options before him.
He could walk to the Tower now, in the body of a Primordial of Primordials at the peak of the ninth dinsion, and he could face whatever was waiting with the power he had earned across a hundred million years. That power was sufficient. He knew this. He had watched it end, Enoch. It may not end the Great One, but it would have made the Great One bleed, and in so versions of this story, making the Great One bleed was all that was required.
With the Origin Tree and the actions he had made, Eos knew that his death no longer truly mattered because he had birthed the Will of Truth, and that was a power that even the Great One could not destroy.
Being able to personally challenge the Great One was a sign that even this being had acknowledged Eos's victory in this aspect.
Or he returns to his throne, which was still there at the base of the Origin Tree, still waiting, still rooted in the soil of the completed fusion. And he could allow the thing that had just finished forming inside him to fully erge, in its own ti, without being rushed by battle.
The Great One had waited for countless eternities, and it could wait another.
Eos turned around, he walked back to his throne, and he sat down, and he closed his eyes.
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For a hundred million years, his core had been a thing of endless potential.
Ether had pulsed through it. Every breakthrough had enlarged it, and every loss had deepened it. It had grown with him through every transformation, and it had, at every stage, been a question with an unfinished answer, the question of what could beco, asked by the very act of its continuing to exist.
The question was answered after his fusion was completed.
When he had killed Enoch and walked out to et the Great One, sothing in him had already been shifting; he had spent the last of his Ether killing Enoch, and emptiness had flooded in. A new energy had been growing in the roots of the Origin Tree since the fusion began, as a transition had been in place all this ti, and sitting on his throne, he felt the last piece click into place.
His Ether was gone, and Eos felt a bit of sadness as the last residues of the old energy had dissolved into the substrate of his being, and what remained in their place was the new thing waiting for him to accept this change.
Eos hesitated for a mont, and he opened himself to it, and his core, which had for a hundred million years been a growing, questioning, incomplete thing, beca an answer.
His endless potential had finally crossed one of the most important thresholds in his life.
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His core, which resembled a dying sun, suddenly exploded, and what ca out of it was an energy that did not co with a na.
Nas were a thing that his consciousness imposed on his states, and his consciousness, at this mont, was quiet. The new energy simply was. It flowed through the roots of the Origin Tree and into the vessel of his body, and where it passed, the vessel changed.
It was not like Ether. Ether had moved; this did not move. Ether had been a river flowing through him; this was the sea he was now sitting in. Ether had been fuel; this was nature. Ether had been sothing he used; this was sothing he was.
Eos watched it fill him, and after a long while, a word ca to him, not the one he would have expected, not the one he would have chosen, but the one that arrived.
Telos.
He turned the word over in his mind. Telos. An ancient word from the first tongue of the first mortals who had walked across the shores of the first beach.
A word that he should have no reason to know, but because he had fused with Origin and therefore its mories, he was able to see the mory of the very first mortal, and Telos had been a word they used to describe what the pinnacle of existence should be like.
They believed that in the end, everything would return to Telos.
This was a prophecy that was made in a ti that is so distant in the past, that even Primordials would age to dust many tis over in the ti span that had passed, and yet, this prophecy, beyond all common sense, had traveled to the end of all things and found its place inside Eos.
Telos ant the end for which a thing was. The purpose for which a thing was made to fulfill. The shape it was reaching toward when all of its developnt was done.
The end that was also the whole point.
This new energy was the energy of arrival, and this arrival could be seen as the arrival of a seed at a tree, or the arrival of a question at its answer, or the arrival of a becoming at its being.
It was what Ether had always been aid at, and now it was complete, and it was his.
Telos, he thought, and the energy agreed, and his body began to change.
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