Completed Woe What A Night

[Hilte]

Tonight the academy grounds felt more quiet than they had in years. Something about the atmosphere had shifted and changed since the night the Proctors discovered a young Initiate, Willenia Helms, dead in the courtyard surrounded by hundreds of lit candles. No sign of attack. No evidence of foul play. No poisoning. No wounds. Willenia Helms had simply and, mayhaps, peacefully passed within the somber glow of a thousand flames.

Fennec was sensitive to many things in the world, but the spiritual ether was not one of them. The placidity of the campus she felt could only have been construed as a smoothing and waning tide of inclement weather that had lingered around the region for nearly a month. Even if she rather enjoyed the rapture of violent storms, the serenity of day thawing into night had its own spell.

It had been some time since she'd wandered out into the lower hills of the academy grounds, near the lake where so many initiates had met untimely and watery ends. A painting, commenced at the age of eleven, worked on in bits and pieces from the same vantage en plein air, had not been touched in over a year. The muse came on strong, and so while others quietly stowed away into their private chambers and rooms for the evening, she absconded with the canvas, stand, and necessary affects. Back to the hills, where the lake quietly crept in through the trees.

Back to work.

 

[Orchid]

Rare and beautiful things were everywhere if you looked.
Orchid, recent arrival at the Academy (at the sole insistence of his mother, Sepia Galleus) found calm in the beautiful things.
Tonight he was holding a dead timbercat. It had been attacked by some unknown predator and was now huffing its last breath in his gentle grasp. At the time he thought it the most beautiful thing he'd seen all day.
He was walking along the lakeshore barefoot in his ruffled shirt with very long tasseled wrists and military jacket.
Anirian guard, black and red.
His mother told him it was his father's but even if that wasn't true he liked it all the same.

Something snared his nose on the soft breeze. A smell of someone, human and something else. Crushed petals, powders and oils.
He knew the scent well. Painting materials.
Still holding the dying timbercat in his bloodied hands he followed the smells.
The night and the lake, he had begun to consider them his so he wanted to see who was there.

The intruder did not look like anything he'd seen before.
Lean and dark. Pale and painted. He cocked his head as he looked at her. A painting painting a painting.
How unique.

Slowly and deliberately he walked towards her. Like a magnet pulls a ball of iron so he made his way until he stood as close as manners would allow and cast his eyes from the painting to the painter and back again.
The dying timbercat in his hands was growing cold and it's heart weak.

"Hello."
His voice was two pipes whistling. High and low at the same time.
On his face there was only an expression of mild curiosity.

Fennec

 

[Hilte]

Since the revolution the ways of instruction and expectations here had become lax. Soft.

Initiates frolicked with one another rather than sparred. They worried over small cuts where once they lost entire limbs. They giggled and gossiped and snogged instead of snarling and growling and biting. Etiquette classes stood in place of the death pit. Therapy had become the new punishment for disruptions and poor behavior.

Fennec remembered the days of torture in the catacombs - still lived them, too.

There existed among the fattening sheep a few, rare remaining wolves. The ones who would not forget what it was they had been bred and raised for. The ones who readily bit the had that fed rather than kissed it. The ones who would not ever allow their guard to lower. Not even while sitting among serenity in the lower hills of the academy grounds, painting the lake that crept between the trees.

She sensed him coming long before he arrived. A paintbrush swept across canvas in one hand while a dagger laced with paralytic partially unsheathed by the other.

The hello garnered a frown, and then a turn of the head, and the glower of a thundercloud. It said one thing without saying anything at all: go away.

 

[Orchid]

"Hmm."
This one didn't seem happy to see him.
Not so surprising really, he knew how he looked and wouldn't dream of imposing where he was not wanted. Still this one had come to what he considered to be his lake and he supposed, that made them his guest, of a sort.
*A guest must be offered every courtesy within reason.*
His mothers voice chimed in his ears reminding him of his purpose.
"I can see that you're busy. I'll wait by the shore, for when you've finished."
Orchid gave the midnight painter a stiff bow and set about to the shores edge where he let it lap at his heels. It was cold but that seldom bothered him and certainly not when he had such interesting things happening about him.
The beautiful timbercat was almost done. Her gasps getting weaker, the shock in her eyes turned into slow oblivion as she saw past consciousness and into the infinite. There was so much fear inside her little body, so much pain but it was fading now. She gave a last effort to scramble, outrun death, seek safety that didn't exist.
"Hush, now, shhh."
He stroked the small beast in his hands.
"It's almost done, you've been so brave. Let go. That's it. Go on."
Death came without ceremony. The timbercat deflated its last breath and voided its bladder onto his already bloody hands.
He kept staring at it, mesmerized by the fresh memory of its breathing, it's heartbeat and the present reality of nothing but a hint of lingering warmth.

Fennec

 

[Hilte]

The mute Initiate affixed a glower upon her painting, neglecting to look at the stranger as they spoke and staring straight ahead with such intensity the canvas just might've ignited were she someone more like Thraah. She contemplated extracting his spine from his walking corpse and bleaching it to add to her current armor ensemble, but Harkenov had frowned on doing such things. On the Academy grounds, anyway.

The departure warranted a look his way that followed his retreating figure down to the water's edge ... right smack in the middle of her present landscape. The whites of her eyes thinned behind narrowing lids as she sought out the little-used cerulean blue and dabbed a worn brush tip into it then smeared into the appropriate area on the canvas with a furiously articulate stroke.

...

Fennec sat back, dark eyes shifting from painting to scenery and back again.

Her frown deepened.

The blue blop had made it better.

 

[Orchid]

There it was.
Turning over the body of the timbercat in his hands he waited until the last warmth was gone from it and then he bent slowly and let the lake take it. When he withdrew his hands they were hardly cleaner, just wetter.
Water climbed up his sleeves and clung to his wrists. The night air cooled it to freezing. It was very uncomfortable but he endured it.
By now his feet were beneath a layer of sand and he was slowly sinking as the water also crept up his trousers.
He wondered if the painter was still there. if they had taken the time to leave or if even now they were still working on capturing the lake.
To turn around now seemed, improper somehow, like a violation.
Still he'd have to move eventually unless they came to him.
What a notion that was, as if they'd both stand by the lake at night, like a in a poem by Janus the Red.
Perhaps he'd let the lake take him and he could finally know where all those animals he'd put in it go.
As with all things, patience had its part to play.
Orchid could be patient.

Fennec

 

[Hilte]

He would remain alone.

Fennec, detestfully ruffled by blue, promptly began to put her kit away. Normally there was a ritual of this - meticulous and detail oriented. Brushes cleaned and dried, their tips flattened and straightened then topped by protective leather covers. Individually sorted back into slots of a roll, then coiled with even tightness and tied with a straight bow and set into its ordered place within a shoulder bag. Everything in the image of perfect function. Exactly as it was when she first arrived.

Tonight the unwelcome breaking of solitude had also broken the routine.

She quickly wrapped the used brushes together in a length of gauze and shoved the various instruments into her bag. The only thing saved from it was the canvas in question - carefully covered and lashed to the easel.

When all had been collected, Fennec spared the intrusive stranger in her scene a cursory glance and then departed her spot, stalking across the grasses of the hillside back to the Academy.

 

[Orchid]

His feet sloshed as he turned around to find the painter had flown. The smell was still fresh in the air though, following would not be so difficult if he tried and he did not suspect the painter of being faster than him. Few people were when he applied himself.
Still he was left with the question of what to do now.
Persue or abandon?

Orchid took six seconds to decide before he exploded into movement. His limbs grew long and loose as he scuttled along the sand and up into the brush, which hissed at his passing. He was fast, so very fast when he didn't have to worry about being seen and the dark of night helped him stay that way, low and long he dug his filthy fingers into the earth for purchase and hauled himself forward in strong motions of his twisted form until he could see the painter ascend the hillside.
The equipment had slowed them down. Orchid reasoned it must be important to them.
He returned to his prefered form and stood, stepping out of the thicket which gave him cover and into the moonlight of the path behind the Painter. The dirt on his hands and feet were fresh and had clumped to mud by the lakes wetness. His hair had now twigs in it and his jacket looked ruffled a slight hunch to his stance. The bodies memory of his previous form.
"Hey."
His voice was calm, hardly out of breath.
In truth he had no idea what to do now. Was this one of the ones who could hurt him? He didn't know but it was possible.
He only knew that he wanted to see the painting.
"Let me see the painting."
*Manners my Son, remember always, manners*
"Please, may I see the painting?"
He did not know what to expect from the painter, maybe they'd use their powers on him. He was not close so maybe that was a good thing. If they were like him and were better served up close.

Fennec

 

[Hilte]

She'd stopped before he appeared, as if expecting him to, and watched with narrow eyes as he stepped nonchalantly from the brush. The look he received was one of perturbed confusion and the small Initiate's lips drew thin and pursed. To answer him required setting everything down and signing that he had already seen the painting and why did he need to see it again?

The fact of the matter was that she simply did not care about the why and that pursuing such a useless conversation that she foresaw spinning down a rabbit hole of stubbornness was a huge waste of her time. Especially when her paintbrushes needed to be cleaned and put away properly.

Instead she blandly conceded to the request with no small amount of grave irritation, held up the canvas and carefully flipped the cover back for him to see.

 

[Orchid]

It was a good painting but there was something new to it.
A blue streak on the centre of the image that drew the eye to the core of the image. It really tied the image together.
"Is that me? Oh, never mind. I don't suppose your going to start speaking now."
It must be him. It was exactly where he was standing at the lake shore.
Orchid realised that he wanted this painting.
"How much for it?"
Negotiations, he expected, would be short.

Fennec

 

[Hilte]

He was correct in assuming she would not start talking now. Good, because the efficiency of this conversation was at a level of cold molasses that was almost painful to endure. Fen waited, painted face immutable as he inspected her work.

The paint was drying under his gaze. She could hear grass growing on the hillside.

Could feel the paint remnants crusting over on the paintbrushes in her soul.

This was taking entirely too long. She'd rather be in the catacombs enduring the latest mind-breaking lesson from Harkenov.

He wanted to buy her painting.

He ... wanted to buy her painting?

The whites of her eyes flashed in brief ... was that confusion or discomfort? She stared at him, nonplussed, and silently held it out to him without any fanfare.

 

[Orchid]

"What, really?"
This might be a trick but it didn't feel like one.
The painter really was just giving it to him.
Gingerly and with care he took the painting from her in his slightly mucky hands.
"Thank you. I'll look after it."
He meant it too. This was going up on the wall, maybe over that window.
"I feel I should give you something else I might feel in debt to you. Anything you'd like?"
He wondered what such a creature as this could want, what desires had someone who seemingly lived in such solitude?

Fennec

 

[Hilte]

Her peace and quiet would be a good place to start.

Fennec shook her head once, and then sliced the air horizontally before her with her free right hand in a casual Sign indication of no, nothing, negative.

 

[Orchid]

*Accept all gifts with grace.*
Again he heard his mother's council and so Orchid gave a short bow of his head in acknowledgement.
"As you wish, you strange and silent painted person."
Steadily he tucked the painting under his arm, careful to not mark it or smudge any of the still drying parts.
"I frequent the lake often."
He took a few steps down from her on the path, beginning back along the path to the water.
"If I see you again, I'll let you be but if ever you'd like to... interact, you may let me know, in whatever way suits you best but I do hope to see you again. I'll admit that much."
Another few steps away the invisible anchor he held the painter with would only break with distance. In that moment he considered her to be more animal than person. Silent and wary and watchful of him. So he made himself distant and small and harmless.

Fennec

 

[Hilte]

Fen made a mental note not to paint any lake scenes ever again so long as this Initiate was alive. She would find a new space to capture for the next one. The abandoned tower in the blackwood, maybe. That one had good potential for chiaroscuro in the right light.

As for interacting, never again would be too soon, so far as she was concerned. This extreme amount of socializing would hold her over for the remainder of her last year at the Academy. The girl watched him in silence, made no indication of any inclination to the offer, and turned to depart once he was too far away to grab with her mystes.

Time to clean paintbrushes and prep a new canvas.

 

[Orchid]

By the time Orchid had returned via the window to his lavish dorm room the sun was cresting the horizon and he was tired.
With care he put down the canvas painting and with swift indifference he removed his clothes and dressed for bed.
He then spent a long time looking at the painting of the lake.
His hand mimicked the motions of the painter. The strokes that took colour and gave it form and weight and at the same time none of these things.

"A painting from a painted painter, huh. Now that is a thing I've never had before."

After hanging it over the window to block the light he slithered into bed and relaxed. A smile full of mismatched teeth and things that could not be teeth but could hardly be anything else crossed his face as he realised that they had not even given their names.

Such a unique night.

Fennec