Eos sat before his board and watched his world being torn apart.
He was watching a number of lives that did not resolve to a number, and he was watching all of them simultaneously, because his attention as Telos of the new Existence was capable of distributing across every life in the Tree at once.
Eos had long ago decided that he would not distribute his attention selectively when his children were suffering, and had committed to attend to all of them, no matter how much that would hurt him; it was his duty, and he attended to all of them now.
His attention was inside Liahra at the river when her hand tightened around the collar of her dog. It was inside Veris at his easel when his hand made the first wrong stroke. It was inside the musician and the surgeon and the poet and the grandmother and the doctor and the teacher and the priest and the uncountable others who were, in this same instant across uncountable worlds, beginning to do what their bodies had been made to do.
