Read Novel Full Chapter 5470: The Painter! III
Chapter 5470: The Painter! III
Noahs figure was on the painting!
His visage filled the canvas, kneeling, and the painter had missed nothing. THE Estuary Eye turned above him with its lemniscate pupil rendered exact. THE Pinion Vigil spread behind him, hundreds of blue-obsidian eyes caught mid-blink, appendages Noah had shown to almost no living thing. But it was where he knelt that held the eye. The painted Noah knelt at the edge of a vast pool of pure white nothing, a whiteness the brush had somehow made deeper than any color, and his hand was submerged in it to the wrist. And rising out of that white, closing around his forearm as if in greeting was another hand.
Enormous, ancient, its flesh worked with turning lemniscate patterns like the Eye and the Vigil and the Root, reaching up from whatever the white was to take hold of the being it recognized. The painted Noah’s face was not afraid. It was grand abd imperious and without an ounce of fear!
The second showed THE Creature!
And he... was kneeling too. THE Creature knelt in the painting, and before him stood a figure the brush had refused to finish. A silhouette only, tall and still, its edges frayed into raw canvas as though the paint itself had not been permitted to describe it, and around the unfinished figure the painted world bent, the horizon curving toward it, the light leaning in. THE Creature’s gaze seemed grand and defiant as he looked at such a being!
The third painting showed a door.
It stood alone in the center of the canvas, in the middle of a plain of grey ash that stretched to every edge, a door of plain dark wood with no wall around it and no frame beyond itself, slightly ajar. Through the gap poured a thin line of light that the brush had rendered in colors that did not exist anywhere else on the canvas, colors Noah’s eyes kept failing to name.
And scattered across the ash before the door, small in the composition and terrible once seen, lay crowns. Dozens of them. Broken crowns and whole ones, ancient designs and strange ones, every crown rendered abandoned in the grey, as though everything that had ever ruled anything had walked to this door, set its crown down, and gone through.
The nearest crown to the door, freshest in the ash, was a simple circlet of deep cerulean.
...!
Noah looked at the three paintings, and frowned.
He did not waste the frown on disbelief. The first canvas had settled the question of belief on its own, showing appendages the painter could not have seen. The questions worth asking had multiplied instead. What was the white pool, and whose hand rose from it, and why did the painted version of himself look like a man being welcomed?
Who could an unfinished silhouette be, that THE Creature knelt to it?
And the door. Above all, the door in the ash, with its light of unnamable colors and its graveyard of crowns, and the cerulean circlet lying closest, newest, already set down.
Beside the easel, shielding her brother with her own body, Ryaenara stared at the paintings, and her eyes had gone grim in a way that stripped every last trace of mirth from THE Mirthful Antiquity!
She looked to Noah as if she wanted to question him, but he was the one who needed to question her and this sick brother of hers who looked like he could die any second!
Noah looked at the three paintings a while longer, and asked the room the only question worth asking.
"What are all these? What do they mean?"
Ryaenara answered seriously, and her eyes went to her brother as she did.
"Ulf carries a curse tracing across Lineages of Existence, all the way back to Those Who Remain," she said. "Something involved in that lineage is the capability to glimpse pasts and futures. They can be real. They can be probabilities that never come to pass. They can be nothing at all, noise wearing the shape of meaning." Her voice carried the weight of ages spent learning the difference the hard way.
"Very rarely does such a True Weaving of Existence express itself across the Ages. It expressed itself in him. And subsequently, the curse did as well. The two arrived together, and I have never found a way to separate them."
...!
Her words were heavy, and Noah looked at the sickly figure of Ulf with genuine sympathy, a young man handed a window into time and a death sentence in the same breath. But sympathy did not stop the paintings pulling at him. The white pool and the rising hand. THE Creature on his knees. The door and its graveyard of crowns, his own cerulean circlet freshest in the ash. He looked past Ryaenara to the painter himself.
"What do the paintings mean?"
...!
Ulf hesitated for a moment before he came out from behind his sister.
He emerged slowly, tubes trailing, and the apprehension had burned off him somewhere in the last minutes, leaving only the fascination underneath. He looked at Noah the way collectors look at pieces they had only read about, and when he answered, his thin voice carried an eccentric brightness that his dying body had clearly never managed to kill.
"I have no idea!"
He said it almost cheerfully, shaking his head.
"None. I just paint when I feel like painting. The images arrive, my hands move, and I find out what I made when it’s finished, same as anyone else looking at it. Some of them turn out to be truly the future, exactly as painted, stroke for stroke. Others are possibilities that never happen at all, futures that died somewhere before arriving. Some I understand completely. Most I have no idea what they mean, and I never find out." He kept shaking his head, incredulity and fascination tangled together, his eyes never leaving Noah’s face.
"But you... I painted you multiple times in one day, and I have painted you before that, and I never knew who you were! I didn’t even get a chance to show Sis the new paintings. Do you understand how strange that is? Things I paint do not usually walk in..."
When Noah saw that look, the fascination that kept climbing rather than settling, he walked toward the sickly being, slow and even, reading him as he came. For a painter of futures to be this fascinated, staring at him like the collection was incomplete, meant one thing.
"There are more?" Noah couldn’t help but ask.
Ulf coughed, a thin wet sound that made his sister’s whole body tense, and looked at Ryaenara. Something passed between the siblings, permission asked and reluctantly given, and then he waved one frail hand, hesitantly.
One more painting emerged from the drifting flock.
It unfurled between the trees, larger than the other three, and it was a battlefield.
Noah stood at its center. Emotive stood beside him, amaranthine light rendered in strokes that somehow moved. THE Creature loomed at his other side, wrapped in obsidian flame, and Ryaenara stood with them, slender and wild and unmasked, and around the four of them stood the shadows of others, figures the brush had sketched in silhouette, present but not yet clear. They stood together, grand and unbowed!
And surrounding them, filling the canvas to every edge, were armies.
Armies of Infinite Lifeforms, rank upon rank upon rank, rendered in such number that the eye gave up counting and simply accepted the tide of them. The weakest among them read as Triassic Scale. Scattered through the host, over a hundred figures carried the unmistakable weight of THE Mesozoic Scale. And rising out of the armies like statues given breath, two massive True Lifeforms towered over everything, vast beyond the ranks around them, their scale and their seamlessness placing them above THE Mesozoic entirely.
In the painting, surrounded by all of it, Noah was raising his hand.
Domineeringly. His arm extended toward the endless armies, and his thumb pointed down, the oldest verdict there was, delivered to a hundred Mesozoic beings and two True Lifeforms and a tide of Infinity with the casual finality of an emperor who had already heard the whole case. And his expression, rendered in small careful strokes by a dying man’s steady hand, was the exact look of a being who had examined everything arrayed against him, weighed it fairly, and found it insufficient! He found it merely average as his thumb pointed down as if he had given the verdict of death!