Why? Painter asked, so pained it made her shudder. Why must it be sad?
Because this is what I have to do, she whispered back, feeling her entire essence unravel. Memories vanishing. Experiences vaporizing. She couldn’t remember her own face any longer. She was…just smoke. From that smoke came old thoughts, echoes. Lies drilled into her from long ago.
I was created to serve, she said. My life is not my own.
It doesn’t have to be that way, Painter sent to her. Your life can belong to you. It should.
Around her, the spirits continued to exult, their emotions so strange to her in contrast to her own pain.
I’m losing myself, Nikaro, she thought. No one knows me anymore. I don’t even know myself. I’m sorry. It was always a dream. Such a wonderful dream. Perhaps the first such ever given by a nightmare…
Yumi, he sent. I love you.
Finally a good emotion.
I love you, Painter, she thought back. Please. Remember me.
And at last, the sole remaining yoki-hijo—chosen as a baby, designated to give her life—did exactly that. Evaporating away into nothing.
Why do we tell stories?
They are a universal human experience. Every culture I’ve ever visited, every people I’ve met, every human on every planet in every situation I’ve seen…they all tell stories. Men trapped alone for years tell them to themselves. Ancients leave them painted on the walls. Women whisper them to their babies.
Stories explain us. You want to define what makes a human different from an animal? I can do it in one word or a hundred thousand. Sad stories. Exultant stories. Didactic morality tales. Frivolous yarns that, paradoxically, carry too much meaning.
We need stories.
I’m sorry I had to bring this ending to you. But the more you think about it, the more you’ll realize that our tale today had to end in such a way. Stories demand certain endings. It’s part of their nature.
I wish I could have explained this to Painter, kneeling as he did on the cobbles, staring out as his world turned upside down. Because he didn’t understand.
He thought the story wasn’t finished.
Painter stood up, then seized his brush in fingers that ached from his extended battle. He took Akane’s ink as she cowered down, looking up as the sky opened and the darkness vanished. He strode past terrified police, among wounded painters, past people who cried out at the strange light. He reached a blank wall. The one that had been left for him. The masterpiece he had never finished.
There, as a city panicked—full of people seeing the sun for the first time—he started painting.
Horribly inconsiderate of him. We were all ready to go home. The story should have been done.
He just kept on painting anyway.
A painting is, of course, a story too. Not a still fragment of one as you might think, but an entire story. Every painting moves, full of life, if you know how to look at it.
Here he painted a picture of a beautiful woman sitting on the branch of a tree. Soaring high in the sky, flowers bursting behind her like fireworks.
“I know you,” he whispered.
The curve of her hair as it curled around the sides of her head to spill down her back. The line of her chin, the defiant confidence in her eyes. The smile. That smile.
“I know you.”
Painter didn’t have two thousand years of experience. But in some ways, what he did have was better. Because art requires intent. Art requires passion. And among all the painters in the city, you would never find a person with more of either.
As the city trembled and people panicked all around him, Painter worked calmly. The shroud vanished in large chunks, leaving behind wisps of darkness. He seemed to paint from this smoke itself, using the ink of the soul.
Her dress, the shade of the sky that day, captured in inkwash greyscale. The blazing sun, a section with no paint at all, contrasted by the streaks around it.
Painter finally had a reason for his masterwork.
For him, audience had always been so very important—and today he had a singular audience. One person. The most important one.
Something touched him on the arm. Unseen, yet warm, sending a thrill of heat through him as he painted the flowers. Smoke from the dying shroud clung to him, one of the few patches remaining. No one noticed it. They were too busy dealing with what they assumed was the end of the world.
Another touch. On the other shoulder.
A final flourish, the dots that were her pupils. Then he turned to find smoke behind him, spinning like a vortex. White on the inside, an infinite hole, the eye of a nightmare. Within it a dark shape reaching toward him.
Painter dropped his brush and reached in.
And took her hand.
I… Her voice. It’s not right…
“Yumi,” he said, tears in his eyes, holding on tight. “We decide what is right. Nightmares can be real. Why not dreams? You have power granted by the spirits. Your whole life—your dozens of lives—you’ve used it to serve. Use it for yourself this once.”
But…
“Our world, Yumi. Our rules.”
I don’t…
“Our world. Our rules.”
Our…world.
“You deserve to live.”
Our rules.
“You deserve to be happy.”
I…deserve to choose. I deserve love.
Her other hand emerged from the smoke and seized his. They held to each other as the city trembled, the smoke died, and the world changed. They clung to one another as light from above rained down and shone on her face.
The last wisps of darkness vanished.
And at the end of it all, when someone finally thought to check on him, they found Painter huddled against the wall beneath a masterpiece of incredible caliber, holding a young woman tight in his arms.
As real as anyone else. Because she wanted to be.
Right about then, I woke up.
Design was waiting for me, lounging behind the bar, smirking at me in the most unbearable way. Why I ever gave her a face, I’ll never know.
“About time you loosened up a little,” she said.
“Shut up.” I shook off the dozen or so coats that had been hung all over me, then pulled off the hooks and other things she’d attached for the purpose.
I had to blink paint out of my eyes. Storming Cryptic.
I kept the crown though. It was a special kind of awful.
“What happened?” she asked.
“Remember that time I got my memories stolen?”
“Yes. It was hilarious.”
“It was humiliating,” I said. “I instituted protection protocols to defend me if something tried to play games with my soul. When we landed here, that machine tried to draw my Investiture. My protocols activated.”
“And turned you into a statue?”
“It…wasn’t exactly what I’d hoped would happen.”
She smirked at me. Insufferable creature. Then she waved around with two eager hands. “I started a restaurant!”
“Yes, I was aware for much of it,” I said.
“Sounds awful!”
“You have no idea.”
“Nope! Any desire to stick around until the next pickup in three years?”
“None whatsoever.”
Outside the front window of the shop, Painter and Yumi passed, supporting one another. They looked like the way it felt to spend three years being a coatrack. In other words, terrible. They paused just outside and kissed, but we’ll get to that.