Paintings alone weren’t enough to hold these. His one consolation was that instead of continuing in through the city, the monsters had surrounded the circle. For now, Kilahito was safe. But as Painter finished helping Izzy, a scream rose from across the circle. He spun to find Nanakai—a painter in her forties—falling in a flash of blood as a nightmare seized upon her nervousness and pushed forward, attacking.
Two others grabbed her as she stammered on the ground, staring with horror at the gouges across her side and arm. Painter had to leap over her and hold the line, but he needed to capture three nightmares at once. And so, without thinking, he defaulted to bamboo. Simple bamboo.
In that moment, it was actually what he needed. It froze all three nightmares briefly, long enough for someone else to step in and help.
He couldn’t stop the entire army himself. He couldn’t stop them at all, not permanently. It was only a matter of time.
* * *
Rubble. The beautiful city she’d seen outside was an illusion, a veneer painted on the surface of the wall protecting the place. Perhaps that was how it had once looked, hundreds of years ago.
Now Yumi walked amid fallen stones and crumbling walls. Roofs had long since decayed away. Turned out she couldn’t visit Torio City itself. Only its grave.
One structure remained at the very center of the city. Yumi imagined it as a grand exhibit hall, with banners out front for the festival of the spirits. Where the scholars had unveiled their amazing new project: a machine that could summon spirits and provide a new form of energy. Hion.
It would change the world.
From the top of the steps, Yumi turned to gaze out through the shroud. In the distance glowed the points of light spaced around Torio City.
“It cannot defeat us like the others,” she whispered to herself. “Remember that.” She stepped inside the building.
The machine was there, dominating the interior like a fat mushroom overgrowing all its siblings. Fully thirty feet tall, with hundreds of legs, it piled stones on all sides in an eternal process—other legs knocking them over as it went. It would have long since broken down, but Investiture—the smoke—repaired each worn joint, replaced each cracked limb. It was, you might say, an undead machine.
Thousands of spirits surrounded it, just beyond the ring of stones. Shimmering entities of liquid light, blue and red in swirls. Imagine them like frozen orbs of water, yet undulating, moving in a rhythm. Like an audience at a concert. Or a sermon.
Yumi steeled herself and stepped forward…before planting face-first into an invisible barrier right inside the doorway.
She pressed her hands against it, then looked through, trapped outside. This place was shielded, as the scholars had said.
* * *
“We can’t hold these!” Tojin shouted, pulling Painter by the arm. “It’s not working! They recover after we paint them!”
Painter glanced toward the center of the circle, to where six of their colleagues now huddled with various dire wounds, bleeding out blood like ink on the ground. One woman wasn’t moving at all. Others groaned in pain.
Nightmares had flooded the street around them—a churning, seemingly endless mass of black punctuated by those sickly white eyes. Pressing in, shrinking the circle. Growing increasingly bold as they recovered from their momentary confusion.
The painters were running out of canvases. The ground was covered in ink, such that stepping was slick.
“What do we do?” Tojin asked, panicked. “Nikaro, what do we do?”
“We paint.”
“But—”
“We paint!” Painter shouted. “Because if we do not, they get into the city. Without us, the people die.”
“The people ignore us!” another cried. “They turn off their lights. They sleep.”
“Because they can’t do anything else,” Painter shouted, starting his next painting. “We are the line between their fears and their flesh. We are the Dreamwatch now.”
“We are the Dreamwatch now,” Tojin said, raising his brush. “We are the Dreamwatch now!”
Others took up the cry as a particularly large nightmare loomed over the group. At least fifteen feet high, but familiar.
Yes. Familiar.
Lupine. Smoky shape like jagged edges of glass. Liyun was here…
Liyun. Painter’s eyes widened.
That was the answer.
* * *
Yumi knelt, defeated, at the invisible barrier surrounding the machine’s hall.
Rocks bounced off the shield when she tried to break it down. Her shouts did nothing.
All this way. For nothing.
Pain stabbed at her. But not her own. She frowned and stepped back outside to look…toward something?
Painter, she thought. She could feel him, faintly. The Connection had not been entirely severed.
He was frantic, fighting.
Nightmares will come. Endless nightmares. To destroy him, and all he knows. All that he might have told.
It was not a thought but an impression. Knowledge of what the machine would do to protect itself. The scholars weren’t completely right about it having no will. Any object as Invested as it was would take on at least some trappings of self-awareness.
Painter would die. If he survived this first wave of nightmares, others would come. Thousands upon thousands, until Kilahito was rubble.
Yumi turned back to the awful machine, tears in her eyes. It, in turn, continued its eternal stacking. To it, one pile was the same as another. Things to build, knock over, then build again. The walls inside, the floor, much of the stone beneath had been chopped up to continue feeding its efforts. Beneath lay the sand its earlier stones had become over the centuries.
It didn’t care what it made. All it did was keep going, maintaining its hold on the spirits for power.
It didn’t care.
Yumi stalked away from the hall of the machine and down the steps, dress flowing and rippling in the wind. At the grand courtyard in front—once magnificent, now rubble—she knelt.
And started stacking.
* * *
Painter didn’t try to force Liyun’s nightmare into the shape of a bird, or cat, or even bamboo. He didn’t look at the shifting darkness to find some vague impression. He didn’t need that crutch. He knew what she was.
He knew her. Stern and unyielding, yet deep down just wanting to help. Those frown lines, those twin blades of hair, that bell-shaped dress…
He didn’t look at her as he painted, but he felt the effects of what he was doing as the others nearby muttered. You weren’t supposed to paint nightmares as people. A person could still kill you. The goal was to pick something innocent, harmless.
Liyun was anything but harmless. Yet he knew this nightmare at its core. That changed everything. As he finished his canvas with a flourish, he looked up to find her kneeling outside the ring of painters. Hands stained by the ink on the ground, gasping for breath.
And as Painter grabbed another canvas from their dwindling stack, Liyun did not revert back to a terrible monster like the others had. The nightmares were people.
He needed to treat them as such.
* * *
Stacking.
You might not call it an art.
You might find it the strangest idea. This is what Yumi’s people revere? This is what they consider the highest aesthetic achievement of their culture? This?
Yet all art is meaningless without those to admire it. You don’t get to decide what constitutes art. But we together do.