Painting Skills

Sana blinked her eyes open, looking around her confused. It took a while for her to remember that she wasn't in her room. She stood up, stretched and sat back down on the bed, cross-legged. Meditation to nourish one's bones should be done everyday.

So, she closed her eyes, breathed in deeply, and Primal Qi streamed into her body. While she could still only stir ten percent into motion, she could already control that ten percent almost perfectly. After a discussion with her mother, she started focusing on fine control first.

After her daily meditations, Sana went to bathe and dress for the day. She met her mother in a smaller dining room than the day before, and after breakfast, her mother asked one of the servants to guide them to Lord Radus.

The fact that even the servant seemed hesitant didn't bode well for the visit. They were led deeper into the compound and eventually arrived in front of a large door. When the servant opened the door, Sana was surprised to see a bright light beaming down from above.

She looked up when she stepped through the doorway and saw a huge glass ceiling above them. Above the ceiling she could see one of the rare empty spots between the treetops. It was angled exactly to allow sunlight to shine directly into the artificial courtyard.

When she looked into the room, she saw dozens of easels standing on the grass-covered ground, as well as paintings covering the walls. The servant excused herself and closed the door behind her.

Radus himself was standing in front of one of the easels, painting what looked like a tree made out of faces. He was adding a face to the top of the tree on the end of a branch. When she stepped closer, she recognized the face as her own with closed eyes, while the face further up the branch looked like her mother's. The tree itself seemed to grow out of a drop of blood. Inside the blood drop a face could be vaguely seen, though unlike the others it didn't resemble any of them.

He didn't seem to notice them entering as he simply continued painting. Her mother wasn't bothered by his behavior, instead looking around at the different, incomplete paintings on the easels. Sana copied her mother but instead looked at the completed paintings hanging on the wall.

Most of the paintings were portraits of people she didn't know or various landscapes, but some were more esoteric. The first painting she was drawn to was of a man she recognized as her father, but he looked younger. He was standing in a shallow river, shirtless and cleaning himself. The second painting was of her mother, also younger, standing blood-drenched on a pile of human corpses, her spear at the ready.

The last was stranger.

It was painted completely black, but as she approached, she could see that something even darker was painted on top of that. She could slowly make out a silhouette of a person in the center of the painting. The closer she looked, the clearer the silhouette became, and the brighter its surroundings appeared. Eventually, the formerly black background seemed blinding compared to the dark figure, so blinding it started hurting her eyes, but she couldn't look away for some reason. The only thing piecing through the absolute darkness that was the figure was two bright, completely white eyes that she could feel looking right at her.

The spell was broken by a curious humming coming from right next to her ear. She turned her head and saw the clean-shaven face of Radus right in front of her, looking at her with a curious smile. She jumped back, frightened at the way he seemed to just appear. She tried to calm her rapidly beating heart and looked around. She saw her mother looking at her in concern from across the courtyard, but she gestured that she was alright.

"What did you see?" Radon asked, looking at the painting. When Sana looked again, she couldn't see anything but a completely black painting without distinction. Sana quickly approached the painting again, but no matter how closely she inspected it, it was simply painted uniformly black.

She looked at Radon, confused, and he asked again, "What did you see?" He continued after facing the painting again, "You see, I have no idea what I actually painted. I was in a fugue state when I painted it, and it was like that when I woke up. I always felt like there was more behind it, and it seemed I was right. No one has ever reacted like you before."

He looked curious but waited for Sana to answer. She calmed down and gathered herself before answering, "I um... I'm not sure, but it looked like a person. They were so deep black that even black seemed blinding to my eyes. And the eyes... it was almost like she could see me."

The longer she talked, the wider his smile grew. "'She'... huh," he mumbled. Sana was startled; she didn't know why 'she' popped into her head when she thought about the figure. It was too vague to make out anything except a basic shape. It simply made sense to refer to the figure as 'she' in her head.

"I was inspired by something when I started making this painting," Radus began. "It was a black tablet I found in an old temple ruin in the Twilight Lands. The temple must have been hundreds of years old, many even a thousand. White characters in the Immortal Script were set into it, but it was barely legible after all these years. After further research, I found that it talked about a war between two huge parties. It also talked about a 'burning Light' and more interestingly for us a 'creeping Darkness'."

Sana was entranced by his story and paid rapt attention. "I've seen references to this 'Light' and 'Darkness' before. It is all over the place if you just look for it. Apparently, the 'Light' and the 'Darkness' are two of five beings of immense power that reside in our world. I've painted them as well if you want to see?" He pointed further behind him and led Sana to another painting.

The painting was white at the top and black on the bottom, the two colors meeting and mingling with each other as if they were fighting.

On the left she could see a blue creature. It had a large, round body with fins instead of arms and a long neck ending in a relatively small head, filled with razor sharp teeth. "The 'Beast'," Radon explained, pointing at it, "It is said to live deep beneath the oceans of this world. So deep neither the 'Light' nor the 'Darkness' can reach it."

On the right was a green tree with a deep brown trunk. "Simply known as the 'Tree'. Its roots are said to reach into the very core of the world."

Looking at the entire composition, she could make out a larger shape, the 'Beast', the 'Tree', and the swirling black and white created. It looked vaguely like a human skull, but it seemed to be grinning at the observer mockingly. "And the last of the five. The one all four are afraid of. Some scholars I talked with were convinced it simply represented death, but I think that's nonsense. While some sources do indeed call the being 'Death', the older sources all simply call it the 'Corpse'."