The Painter's Blot
I am prone to wonder the streets of Waterhelm. Searching for inspiration among its oh-so-perfect gridded streets. Normally in a given day I may find something that upturns the rigidity of our capital, flowering like the first petals from the ash of a forest burned. The swirling technique a Patcher conducts with his mortar, or the unnatural gait of a man with Meyda-infused prosthesis. But shortly before this… incident. It was as though I had never before felt the touch of inspiration on my mind. The structured city hemmed me in on all sides and I couldn’t find an outlet.
It was in the beauty of a Helvan autumn that I found the stained parchment. I called it so for nothing set it apart from any other scrap of paper except behind the scrawling script a dark formless stain blotted the otherwise untainted surface. I lose myself, it was not the stain by which I was drawn, but the alluring words overlaying it. The only honest depiction of it I can give beyond quoting its very words is to say it was the description of a being. Something ethereal, dark and twisting, obviously torturous to the mind which expressed it, but it lit a fire under my Soul. Here was I struck nearly blind by what I longed for: A nonconformity. So I painted with no aim but that of expressing the words which clung to my mind like vines.
It felt nigh impossible to begin, coat the canvas black, and all was wrong. Blending the gray form from that bleak blankness was unwieldy and I felt myself a Patcher with paint: Crude and sloppy. I became quickly depressed. Never had words or visions of my inspiration gone so mistily through my fingers. It was obvious in my mind how it must look when complete but I could barely start before I knew all was wrong.
I sat in deep, agonizing contemplation over stew I made in my hazy stupor. Its black swirling tones taunted me like the shadows in my house and those which followed me under the Day Star’s light. I sighed and my spoon fell, spilling droplets of the dark broth onto my white tablecloth. I cursed with intensity at my fumbling fingers convinced they must belong to someone else for how they betrayed me incessantly. Then I paused, and wept. Great tears of joy fell onto the white linen as I recognized my folly in full and the remedy that had been brought me by those rebellious extremities. The dichotomy was everything, it accentuated and highlighted and obfuscated and reoriented and outlined and camouflaged and discovered all of which I was missing on my washed black canvases.
That night in short, careful work I presented myself with the creature described. The infinite void captured by infinite light, portrayed solely by contrast. It was almost ugly in its simplicity. I scoffed at my prior foolish self who sought to capture such an expanse within itself. Now I had contained it, those beautifully dangerous words that I repeated now. I had not read the page in many nights but I had grounded it in my Ogen from that first reading and muttered it most nights repeatedly until sleep enveloped me. Tonight I would recite it endlessly through the night entirely until the white of my canvas transmuted to mortar gray, then night river black, until in sudden union my paint met the night. I closed my shutters and draped cloth over them to better barricade against Yahti’s intrusion. Then I sat and recited until my tongue tired, my throat ached and my eyes strained. I could not tear myself away from my success, those marvelous words I had managed to put to the eyes pleasure and I alone was their lone enjoyer left to revel in an artistic master not my own in full but a distant collaboration between two disparate minds unconnected or affiliated beside a kinship now actualized in word and image.
He thanked me, I reciprocated, and when I woke in the morning my painting was gone. No. The canvas remained. But that blot I had finally
mastered was unseen, only the faintest stain lingered on my canvas it’s strokes more kin to me than my own flesh.