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.
