The audience tasted Eos's grief as this new and unexpected flavor spread through the tiers like a slow tide, and the audience, who had been eating for so long that they had forgotten what it was to taste something new, did not know what to do with their mouths.
The Painter watched them in silence; its thought was unknown, but its hands were shaking, and Eos too made no move after giving them his grief; he also watched them.
The audience, caught between two servers, did what they had always done when presented with a flavor they did not recognize. They ate more slowly, and they paid attention.
In the tiers, the shift was not uniform. The seventy-thousandth tier, where the being who tasted the edge of erasure sat, was the first to register the difference.
