Done. She was…done?
Her sculpture would be allowed to fade with time as all art does, and eventually would be taken down before the next visit of a yoki-hijo to this town. The power of the devices created in the ritual would eventually weaken, each spirit’s bond remaining in effect for a different length of time. But in general, the more spirits you bound in a session, the longer all of them would last. What she had done today was unprecedented.
Liyun approached to offer congratulations. She found, however, not a magnificent master of spirits—but an exhausted nineteen-year-old girl, collapsed unconscious, her hair fanning around her on the stone and her ceremonial silks trembling in the breeze.
The nightmares had originally come from the sky.
Painter had heard the accounts. Everyone had. They weren’t quite histories, mind you. They were fragments of stories that were likely exaggerations. They were taught in school regardless. Like a man with diarrhea in a sandpaper factory, sometimes all available options are less than ideal. One account read:
I watched it rain the blood of a dying god. I crawled through tar that took the faces of the people I had loved. It took them. Their blood became black ink.
Those are the words of a poet who, after the event, didn’t speak or even write for thirty years. Years later, another woman wrote:
Grandfather spoke of the nightmares. He doesn’t know why he was spared. He stares at nothing when he tells of those days spent crawling in the darkness, that terror from the sky, until he found another voice. They met and huddled, weeping together, clinging to one another—although they had never met before that day, they were suddenly brothers. Because they were real.
And then this one, which I find most unnerving of them all:
It will take me. It creeps under the barrier. It knows I am here.
That was found roughly a hundred years later, painted on the wall of a cave. No bones were ever located.
The accounts are sparse, fragmentary, and feverish. You’ll need to forgive the people who left them; they were busy surviving an all-out societal collapse. By Painter’s time, it had been seventeen centuries—and as far as they were concerned, the blackness of the shroud was normal.
They’d only survived because of the hion: the lights that drove back the shroud. The energy by which a new society had been forged—or, in the parlance of the locals, painted anew. But this new world required dealing with the nightmares, one way or another.
“Another bamboo?” Foreman Sukishi said, sliding the top canvas from Painter’s bag.
“Bamboo works,” Painter said. “Why change if it works?”
“It’s lazy,” Sukishi replied.
Painter shrugged. The small room where he turned in his paintings after his shift was lit by a hanging chandelier. If you touch opposite lines of hion to either side of a piece of metal, you can make it heat up. From there, you’re barely a little sideways skip away from the incandescent bulb. As I said, not everything in the city was teal or magenta—though the hion overhead outside obviated a need for streetlights of any other color.
Sukishi marked a tally by Painter’s name in the ledger. There wasn’t a strict quota—everyone knew that encountering nightmares was random, and there were more than enough painters. On average, you’d find one nightmare a night—but sometimes you went days without seeing a single one.
They still kept track. Too long without a painting to turn in, and questions would be asked. Now, the more lazy among you might notice a hole in this system. In theory, the rigorous training required to become a painter was supposed to weed out the sort of person who would paint random things without actually encountering any nightmares. But there was a reason Sukishi hesitated and narrowed his eyes at Painter after retrieving the second canvas and revealing a second bamboo painting.
“Bamboo works,” Painter repeated.
“You need to look at the shape of the nightmare,” Sukishi said. “You need to match your drawing to that, changing the natural form of the nightmare into something innocent, nonthreatening. You should only be drawing bamboo if the nightmares you encounter look like bamboo.”
“They did.”
Sukishi glared at him, and the old man had an impressive glare. Some facial expressions, like miso, require aging to hit their potency.
Painter feigned indifference, taking his wages for the day and stepping out onto the street. He slung his bag over his shoulder—with his tools and remaining canvases—and went searching for some dinner.
The Noodle Pupil was the sort of corner restaurant where you could make noise. A place where you weren’t afraid to slurp as you sucked down your dinner, where your table’s laughter wasn’t embarrassing because it mixed like paint with that coming from the next one over. Though less busy on the “night” shift than during the “day,” it was somehow loud even when it was quiet.
Painter hovered outside the place like a mote of dust in the light, seeking somewhere to land. The younger painters from his class congregated here with the sort of frequency that earned them their own unspoken booths and tables. A double line of hion outlined the broad picture window in the front, glowing, making it appear like a futuristic screen. Those same lines rose like vines above the window, spelling out the name in teal and magenta, with a giant bowl of noodles on top.
（Technically, I was a part owner of that noodle shop. What? Renowned interdimensional storytellers can’t invest in a little real estate now and then?）
Painter stood on the street, absorbing the laughter like a tree soaking up the light of hion. Eventually he lowered his head and ducked inside, looping his large shoulder bag on one of the prongs of the coatrack without looking. Fifteen other painters occupied the place, congregated around three tables. Akane’s place was in the back, where she was adjusting her hair. Tojin knelt low beside a nearby table, solemnly adjudicating a noodle-eating contest between two other young men.
Painter sat at the bar. He was, after all, a solitary defense against the miasma outside the city. A lone warrior. He preferred eating by himself, obviously. He wouldn’t have stopped in, save for his tragic mortality. Even solemn, edgy warriors against darkness needed noodles now and then.
The restaurant’s manager flitted over behind the bar, then folded her arms and kind of hunched as she stood, mimicking his pose. Finally he looked up.
“Hey, Design,” he said. “Um…can I have the usual?”
“Your usual is so usual!” she said. “Do you want to know a secret? If you order something new, I’ll write it down and wrap it up, then put it in your noodles. But I’ll also tell you what it is, because the paper will get soggy in the noodles, and you won’t be able to read it.”
“Uh…” Painter said. “The usual. Please?”
“Politeness,” she said, pointing at him, “accepted.”
Design…did not do a good job acting human. I take no blame, as she repeatedly refused my counsel on the matter. At least her disguise was holding up. People did wonder why the strange noodle-shop woman had long white hair, despite appearing to be in her early twenties. She wore tight dresses, and many of the painters had crushes on her. She insisted, you see, that I make her disguise particularly striking.