Completed Charcoal and Fire

[Aislyn Leavold]

45th of Summer, 516 AV
Fourteenth Bell

Aislyn had an itch. An unscratchable itch, one that could not be scratched by nail or claw. It had been with her for at least a season now, if not longer. It was an itch that came about every day or so, suddenly, when faced with some sort of scene ahead.
It was an itch to draw.
Aislyn had been putting it off for quite a while; procrastinating her work for a good season and a half. She’d blamed it on the events of the winter, but with the calmness of spring, she really had no excuse. Now summer had risen like a kick to the face and suddenly making a decent living didn’t seem like all that horrible of an idea. The only question was what to draw.

Like many mornings, Aislyn had set out, sketchbook in hand, ‘Maya’ in place, and looked for somewhere quiet to settle down. It had taken time, but she had eventually happened across a proper exit to the city. Those were rare to come by. In reality, it wasn’t much of an ‘exit’, more of just a path that slowly had more trees and less buildings. At first, Aislyn had convinced herself it was just an illusion of a forest, before eventually recognizing the plant life as what it really was- the outskirts of Alvadas. Perfect.

The miniature forest of sorts was just the kind of place Aislyn loved- secluded, serene, and most of all, free of people. As the center of the city grew further away, the amount of people greatly decreased, until eventually it would be rare to cross paths with another sentient being. Not quite outside Alvadas, but close. Still inside the safety of the city- as proven by the ever present feeling of Ionu that never really left Aislyn’s mind- but also touched by nature. The only downside was the likelihood of Verlyna’s pond being nestled within the patch of woods. The pond itself was no problem to Aislyn, it being yet another example of Alvadas’ many fables that may or may not hold truth, but the pond often drew rambunctious tourists attempting to spot some proof of the rumors surrounding the place.
Any true Alvad knew there was no reason to fear the waters as long as you didn’t swim, and didn’t stare for too long. But no one was going to tell the newcomers that.

Nonetheless, the woodsy alcove was the perfect place to draw, and Aislyn took her place cross-leggedly atop a fallen log to begin her work. Something simple, to warm up. Water, how about that? She needed to practice drawing water. The movement was always what got her; any liquid she captured on a page seemed still, frozen. Motion was difficult, especially when one had no way to dictate exactly what was meant by the drawing. The only way to explain was with charcoal, and it was charcoal that Aislyn took to the page. Wavy lines made by a thicker piece accented by a much thinner piece adding the detail. To the artist’s left, the waterfall for which the pond was famous for trickled down over mossy rocks. Gradually, it became outlined in her notebook, first the boulders, then the lines of the water. Smooth, long strokes.

Once again, Aislyn was faced with a problem. It was hard to predict how the water would move, and the drawing looked flat without movement. If everything went in the same direction, it looked too clean; lifeless. But if it was too disheveled, it was the same on the opposite side of the spectrum. It wasn’t realistic.

Sighing, Aislyn twiddled the charcoal between her fingers. Already, her hands were covered in a chalky sheen of black. The piece she held currently was whittled down to the point where it was almost unusable. With a swift movement of her wrist, she flicked it into the water, where it landed with a soft splash.
In the same tick, a crack of a branch came from the woods to Aislyn’s right. An animal, perhaps. A deer, or even a frog perhaps, considering her proximity to a pond. Maybe an illusion.

Or a person.

OOCEdited to reflect Cartez's inactivity 11/01/16. Placeholder status replaced with solo thread.

[713]

[Aislyn Leavold]

Immediately, the artist scooped up herself and her notebook, pulling herself behind the nearest tree thick enough to hide her frame. The smudges on her fingers transferred to the leather of the book- usually she at very least wiped them off first- but there was no time to fuss over that.

It wasn’t so much the fact that Aislyn was fearful of another sentient being approaching her hideaway, but more towards the notion that someone had managed to not only sneak up on her, but also she had failed to catch so much as a glance of who or what had approached. She was effectively blind, so no matter the circumstances, the woman would much rather wait for the person to pass than emerge and be faced with the possibility of interacting.

It was a very long time before Aislyn dared to move. After all, if she waited long enough, whatever it was would just get up and leave.

Ticks passed.

Chimes passed.

Hai, a bell could have passed for all that Aislyn knew before the artist decided to actually begin thinking again instead of holding her breath inevitably. After all, failing to breathe inhibited the ability to go on living quite a bit. Perhaps she was paranoid. Or just cautious. Either was deserved, really. And either could be solved by just sticking her neck out and scoping out the scene. But the phrase ‘sticking your neck out’ often implied some sort of risk, and for some reason, leaving her retreat just didn’t seem safe.
Not a lot of things did anymore.
It had been one season, forty-five days, and- what, twenty bells?- since she’d decided that nothing was safe anymore. But it was strange; not everything was unsafe, per say, rather there were just very specific instances that seemed… Odd.

Sitting on a rooftop during the night, completely alone. The buzzing of some unidentified insect sent her heart rate through the roof. Out in the bazaar, even the vague sight of Divine Legacy and the woman that might as well have saved Aislyn’s life residing inside made her quicken her pace. She carried her knife everywhere, just in case. She did a lot of things ‘just in case’. She couldn’t shut the world out the way she used to, not even on her late-night walks; especially not on her late-night walks. Alvadas was one series of terrible, chaotic events after the next, and Aislyn was no exception to the paranoia that swarmed such events. She took every opportunity she could to protect herself, from threats great and small. Unfortunately, there were many things that her mind seemed to decide were ‘threats’, which caused a great deal of false alarms.
False alarms such as hiding behind a tree because the snap of a twig could be heard in the middle of the woods.

Nonetheless, it was better to be safe than sorry.

It was only once Aislyn began to grow bored of hiding did she actually consider that perhaps she was overreacting. It was also then that she remembered the fact that she had a perfectly good tool to find out what lay behind her. Tail had said something regarding the sight; about the benefits that it gave. Sensing, rather than seeing. Or rather, seeing in a sensing sort of way, where her eyes weren’t actually required in the act. To put it simply, auras didn’t seem to care much for physical barriers, and that was precisely the skill that Aislyn needed. So she slowed her breath, closed her eyes, and sort of half-opened them in a way that made it seem like she was attempting to go cross-eyed; and rather unsuccessfully at that. It took several ticks to get ahold, and even then she was met with a strange nothingness that seemed more like she was staring at her eyelids than anything else. Either she was doing something wrong, or there was nothing there.
So, to test, Aislyn tried latching on to something else. Inanimate objects were usually nice and easy, so she turned her gaze towards the pond. Unfortunately, a magic pool with a supposed drowned hypnotist didn’t seem to be all that inanimate after all. The watercolour-esqe texture Aislyn had seen before in Tail and the man from the House of Broken Mirrors was there again, except in a different shade. And at an intensity that felt like a physical slap to the face. Or more specifically, eyes.

Dropping the sight immediately, Aislyn decided that perhaps a snapped twig was not what she should be concentrating on. Moving her hands to her charcoal again, she pulled open the notebook once more. Pushing her drawing aside, she began a scratch of a sketch on the next available page. It was only once the page was full of lines that she realized she had no idea what she was doing. She wanted to put what she had seen onto a page before it slipped out of her mind, but the problem was there was no real way to depicting an aura on a simple parchment piece. It was akin to describing the difference between left and right, or the smell of the colour blue. The mediums didn’t mix. Tearing the page out of her book, she abandoned the soiled paper to the pond, letting the misplaced idea sink to the sandy bottom. With a twitch in her eye, she returned to her work no more at peace than she had been before, though with a new caution towards the waters whose magic it appeared she had seen.

It seemed the children’s tales weren’t just tales after all.

[938]

[Aislyn Leavold]

For a moment, what Aislyn had originally been doing seemed to slip her mind. It took a moment of staring at a blank page for the woman to realize that she didn’t, in fact, need to completely start anew. Flipping back, she found her original work, the stoic waves and even more serene scene surrounding it. There was always something that couldn’t be captured in her art- at least, not at her level. She couldn’t capture the creak of trees in the wind, the rustle of leaves and the smell of the forest. The city would always be her favourite, but the small bits of nature that surrounded it weren’t all that bad either.
Sinking back down into her original position, Aislyn found herself staring at what might as well been a blank page, the same feeling emanating from it. It looked kind of like an ocean, really. Almost more so than a pond. The banks were unclear and the scale wasn’t quite right. It wasn’t even as if a scene had been frozen in time and looked upon, it was just… Wrong.

The most frustrating thing about Aislyn’s art was perhaps the after effects of the fact that she was entirely self-taught. It was liberating, in a way, to discover how to achieve something entirely independently, but it also meant there was no one to ask questions of. That being said, Aislyn was never much of a relying-on-people person, so it had never particularly bothered her. It did, however, leave some unfortunate gaps in her knowledge in which she had to figure things out for herself; a process that consisted of quite a bit of trial and error.

It appeared she was on the ‘error’ side of things for the moment.

Even the shading- something Aislyn was usually quite proficient in- didn’t appear the way the artist wanted it to. It didn’t seem consistent; was the light coming from straight above, or to the side? To the side would be more realistic, but also made shading the far sides all that much harder. It made the difference in shades look more like a strange gradient than a light imbalance.

Looking over at the peculiar blue-green waters, Aislyn let her mind wander for a moment. The children’s tale of Verlyna’s Emerald Pond. A secluded body of water on the outskirts of the city; not quite within the walls, but not quite outside, either. Verlyna, with the bright green eyes that supposedly put the green in the blue waters.Verlyna, the ghost that would drag naughty children down into her midst if they strayed too far from the safety of Alvadas. A witch that kept children in check. Almost like every other fable in Alvadas. The shadow men that swept the streets at night, stealing away the young and the foolish that kept out too late. The beings made of sea foam that came from the sea, crafted from the illusions that had escaped the city’s walls to creep into the water by the port. The tiny men that brought presents to children that behaved during the Festival of Illusions. All stories told from parent to child to scare them into doing as they were told.
All, of course, ridiculous.

The waters moved calmly, despite having no immediately obvious stream into which it emptied. In fact, the pool had no exit at all, only the endlessly flowing creek that fed into it from the waterfall on the end. If all logic prevailed, the pond would overflow within a day’s time. But it did not. All it did was ripple quietly, the soft sound of the water oblivious to the impossibilities of its existence. Perhaps there was an underground exit; some sort of small cave funnelling water to an unknown destination. It could also be that the incoming water was an illusion- or perhaps the entire pond was illusionary in nature. It was always a possibility, in Alvadas. There was no real assurance of reality, no matter how hard one looked. There was no key to unlocking the illusions, she had learned early on. There was no secret code, nothing that she could know more than anyone else. There was no cheating Alvadas; no cheating Ionu. There was only faith, and the hope to one day understand.

The water was peaceful, in a way. Despite the ominous presence it had below, the surface was quintessentially calm. Deceptively so, perhaps. Looking below the surface brought dangers, the presumable body of the legended hypnotist for which the pond was named lying at the bottom of its depths. The bottom, of course, was nowhere near visible from Aislyn’s position above the waters, but that didn’t mean the pond was entirely cloudy. On the contrary, it was quite clear, though the bottom was still unattainable, obscured by simple darkness, rather than any sort of plant life. It might as well have no bottom, considering the circumstances. Even still, the world below the surface wasn’t as calm as the façade on top, it seemed. There was the occasional light, as if something was somehow aflame beneath the waters.

There was a little bit of truth in every legend.

[860]

[Aislyn Leavold]

Fire, of course, was not often something that was found underwater, and pointed more likely to the strange legend surrounding the pond than an actual fire lit beneath the soft ripples of the water. Aislyn tried to recall what, exactly, she knew of the story of Verlyna’s Emerald Pond. Her mother was most likely the first one to speak of such a thing, of course, but her stories were mostly of the same caliber that many a mother had spoken of in Alvadas. Power-crazed witch with a taste for control that dabbled in horrible dark arts and paid the ultimate price. Magic, the worst taboo of all, resulting in yet another death. A senseless, worthless death, that could have been avoided if no magic was involved. Because magic was a senseless, worthless thing, for senseless, worthless people.

It was unfortunate to whoever made up that philosophy that Aislyn thought so little of herself already. A senseless, worthless soul with a senseless, worthless life. There was nothing new about such a thing. She had no real morals at this point in time. All she had were priorities; priorities such as herself, Alvadas, Ionu, and the people she valued. All fairly high up on her list, and all rather secluded- the lattermost part of her list she could count on one hand. That made things easy, of course. As long as she didn’t add to her list, she had no qualms with her choices. She wasn’t at fault, she wasn’t guilty. All was well.

Of course that was a lie, but ignorance was bliss.

Aislyn had never been a fan of the idea of judgement. After all, she had plenty to attribute to her damnation, should anyone care enough to damn her. Nor had she ever been a fan of the public eye. Thief was always an illusion of the night, meetings with any sort of other beings often a one-time occasion. After all, she had neither the memory nor the patience to remember every name she had dubbed herself under the guise of “Thief”. It helped to never have to introduce herself twice. Maya was a more social illusion, though not by much. She was the day-to-day, the one that existed outside of one-time occasions. She was the artist that held residence at Aislyn’s abode, marked by the sign attached to a mailbox at the door. She was the only illusion who held correspondence with “friends”. She was the only illusion to have friends at all.

The only personality to face the streets of Alvadas head on was Anjani, who would probably need a surname soon enough. Aislyn had never been a fan of surnames. They were too defining; too implicative of more information that could be scoured. A surname implied family, and family implied connections. Connections implied weaknesses, and weaknesses were things Aislyn could not afford. “Maya”- nor any of the names “Thief” had adorned- had ever brought family with them. No one had really asked. But Anjani was becoming more of a person and less of an illusion at a rather alarming rate, and it was something Aislyn wasn’t prepared to deal with. Anjani had people that liked and disliked her, and people she had to protect. Anjani knew a Speaker personally, and that was a connection that could be highly favourable or highly unfavourable, depending on the circumstances it wrought. But that was something to deal with in the coming seasons. “Anjani” had to worry about how to protect her identity from the hivemind of the Sheathewhisps, of who she’d come to associate with. “Maya” had to worry about how to make a drawing of water look more interesting than a block of wood.
Different illusions had different priorities.

Attempting a different approach, Aislyn turned the page in her sketchbook to begin anew. This time, she didn’t start with the water. The first thing dedicated to the page in dusty charcoal was the faint outline of a flickering flame. Not entirely tangible, written in with the slightest of pressure. Some of the lines she went over more than once, with a modest change. The lines didn’t quite match up, meaning the original shape didn’t grow darker. Rather, the shape multiplied into several mirrored forms that looked like a cross-eyed vision. Cloudy, and not quite real.

Aislyn wasn’t really sure what she was going for, but she was going to achieve it one way or another.

[737]

[Aislyn Leavold]

Fire was a bit easier than water. Aislyn had always liked the heat better than the cold. Alvadas had always been fairly warm, and the illusionist wasn’t complaining. The cold always left her with a feeling she didn’t exactly enjoy, with the biting wind and invading chill. There had been a winter many years prior where Ionu had decided to throw its usually mild city into the midst of a snowstorm, leaving the quite unprepared citizens in unfamiliar territory. Aislyn hadn’t owned anything warmer than a cloak at the time, and she’d quickly learned that staying inside forever was not a viable option. So, instead of let her mother go, Aislyn had ventured out into the blizzard and nearly died of hypothermia doing it. She’d stumbled around the streets for what seemed like bells in a drunken confusion until she’d found the bazaar. Making it back home had been a miracle, though she hadn’t stopped shivering for a fortnight after.

Fire, on the other hand, brought warmth and light where the water hid dangers in its depths. Or, in this case, the water hid fire in its depths. Which, of course, was a peculiar thing to see, but it was something that she was seeing nonetheless. And now, it was something she was drawing.

Once the flames were sufficiently spread across the page, Aislyn began work on the next piece of the puzzle that didn’t happen to be the water. She outlined the banks, creating muddy ridges that seemed precariously unstable next to the water. The waterfall was perhaps the easiest waterflow to create, its motion clear and direction obvious. There was no logic to say the water was flowing anywhere but down, and so that was where the water seemed to lead. It would take an unfamiliar illusion to force the water against its grain, and that, of course, was not what Aislyn wanted to do. She was just drawing a scene; she had her reference played out right in front of her. All she needed to do was copy it down, and she’d be done.

Of course, things were never that easy.

For a moment, Aislyn wondered why she was trying at all. It had been nearly a bell now, and all she had done was jump at noises that weren’t there and spend the rest of the time on a warm-up sketch that had quickly blossomed out of control. Truly the epitome of productivity.

On the page there was now a rather barren scene; a pond with no water and flames licking up where the waves should have been. It was nice as it was, really, but it was still incomplete and Aislyn had a need to do something about that. She had such a nice base, now, all she needed was to not mess up the water, and she’d have the perfect depiction of the strange atmosphere of the pond. Or, rather, as perfect as it was going to get. Nature scenes were easy and nice, yes, but they never had the livelihood that Aislyn had poured into her other works. Perhaps it was just her experience drawing illusions, but whenever she depicted something of Ionu’s work the drawing always seemed to have that extra quality that nothing else of hers could achieve. A depth and intimacy simple drawings of ponds and trees couldn’t dream of having. Like it was real; something that could be touched and seen and heard. Ironically, it seemed Aislyn’s drawings didn’t mirror the reality on which it was based on. On the contrary, it made the unreal lifelike and the tangible dreadfully lifeless.

It was strange how art worked.

Aislyn had never been a fan of drawing moving subjects- it was hard to keep the details the same if said details wouldn’t keep still- but she had always hated the lackluster appearance of still-life works of art. There was no creativity in a bowl of fruit, drawn over and over in different art styles and colours and mediums. But there was quality in it that came from the ability to look at the same thing, over and over again, until it was easily copied down onto canvas paper. Moving subjects had the grace and personality that a pile of apples did not, but they also often failed to have the ease that inanimate objects gave the art being made of them. Moving subjects relied on the memory of the artist, whilst stationary ones provided a crutch on which to lean.
Aislyn’s dilemma fell somewhere between the two situations.
The water, of course, was moving. It rippled back and forth in erratic patterns based on where the waterfall’s current pulled. But the illusionist need not memorize what those patterns looked like, or where the water met the sand. The water itself didn’t move, but it was still in motion. Aislyn wasn’t relying on her memory to bring her a reference, but she couldn’t stare endlessly into the water until the ripples stopped rippling, either.

Like most things, it seemed the middle ground was the hardest to achieve.

[845]

[Aislyn Leavold]

Despite her earlier promise to herself not to endlessly stare into the water, when Aislyn found herself without the motivation to draw anymore, she ended up staring anyways. It wasn’t exactly unlike her to distance herself from her surroundings and spend chimes upon chimes staring off into the distance blankly, but it wasn’t terribly productive, either. She wasn’t getting any work done by staring into the water, waiting for inspiration to come. Even still, it was relaxing. Being alone was always relaxing. Being alone in a forest a ways away from Alvadas was relaxing. Being alone with nothing but her art and the soft sound of running water was relaxing.
Knowing she was getting nothing done, however, was not relaxing.

After a few more moments watching the flickering fire and the wrinkling water, Aislyn decided that perhaps this wasn’t meant to be. It wouldn’t exactly be hard to simply not draw water at any point in her life ever. But that would be giving up, and by now Aislyn had invested enough time and energy into trying to draw a pond that didn’t look like it had iced over in wintertime, rather than sitting in the midst of the summer season. Flipping back a page, the artist glanced over her previous attempts before continuing on. Perhaps if she didn’t try so hard at motion, instead focusing on simply making it look like water, she’d get somewhere. Ocean waves were easier; they had a distinct pattern and a distinct shape, and they were everywhere. Enclosed bodies of water could move in any direction, or no direction at all, and that was the issue. If she made the movement in a circular direction, it looked too convenient; unnatural. But if it moved in a straight line, it was a river or a creek. Ponds were just useless collections of water that were rather inconvenient to draw. This one just happened to be a magical useless collection of water.

Moving her head from the downward position of staring at her work, Aislyn turner her gaze upwards. The canopy above was a patchwork cloak covering the blue-grey sky above. It would rain soon; the clouds were certainly threatening it. But the trees cared not for what the weather was doing, all they did was sway in the breeze that carried them further away from the situation at hand. It must have been nice, not having to worry about work or food or art. Trees didn’t have to spend bells staring at empty ponds with Ionu knew how many decaying bodies at the bottom, trying to find a way to make a drawing of said pond more interesting than the pond itself.

Aislyn started with the lightest strokes she could manage, determined to make this the last time she went over the mundane waves with a thin piece of charcoal. She made many glances up to the water, to mirror it perfectly onto the page. If she couldn’t make it lifelike, the least she could do was make it realistic. Below the water were flickering illusions, whilst atop the surface was the reflection of the foliage above the pond. She’d been trying so hard for motion, but perhaps motion was what was making the scene seem less… right. She was sitting in a secluded clearing in a forest on the outskirts of the city; there was nothing rushing to move or change. Perhaps that was what she was missing. Not the motion, but the lack thereof.

The ripples of the pond escalated from one particular corner, where the waterfall fed into the rest of the body. The ripples moved softly across the water, leaving patches of light and dark moving fluidly along the surface. It was hard to properly shade water like how it really appeared for that reason. It was easy to make a mirror, but it was hard to make the reflection. The lines were wavy and imprecise, and never remained motionless for long enough to memorize. They would remain in place no matter what once confined to parchment, however, and Aislyn supposed she’d just have to live with that. It was a wonder she’d dedicated herself to the one topic for that long anyways. She’d told herself it was just a beginning piece, but by now it had taken up too much of her time to not make the artist a few mizas in its sale.
Working up the water away from the falls, Aislyn drew almost-parallel crooked lines in progressively larger arcs as time went on. The ripples spread out, affecting even the farthest reaches of the pond, where the waterfall itself couldn’t dream to touch.

The drawing came slowly, warped images made of charcoal emerging as she worked from left to right. If she treated the water like any other image, with its highs and lows and lights and darks, she could apply what she was skilled at to what she lacked in. It was her tactic with most things; she adapted to her situation through the application of skills she was already competent in. Water was just a fluid version of land. It still held shape when confined to an area, it just moved more. She could shade it like an uneven distribution of hills, the pits dark and the tops light. The ripples were moving mountains, their crevices shifting and changing as time crawled on.

Drawing the flighty illusions that lay below the water first, before the addition of the water itself, had proven to be a favourable course of action. The layering didn’t look right if what was behind was drawn on top, and simply reversing the order was much easier than tricking the eye into believing something that wasn’t immediately obvious.
After all, it was quite a bit harder to craft an illusion with a piece of charcoal than it was with a gnosis.

[984]

[Aislyn Leavold]

It took a few more chimes of staring blankly at her work before Aislyn was pleased with what she had created.

It wasn’t a rushing river, certainly, but it looked like what what it was, and what it was was a pond with strange hallucinations sitting at the bottom. It was yet more proof that Alvadas had quite its fair share of secrets, illusionary and not. Occasionally, both. Aislyn had lived in the city of illusions all her life and still never failed to find new things to discover. The illusions were ever-changing, unique. Ionu’s imagination knew no bounds, each day bringing some sort of new reason to love the city. Or a new reason to hate it. After all, illusions were as much part art as they were living beings. “Living” was a rather broad term, anyways. Ionu’s illusions weren’t made of flesh, didn’t breathe or bleed, but they had character and almost seemed to think, observing the observer for all they were worth. Illusions, no doubt, acted differently towards different beings.
Mostly, Ionu’s creations were kind to Aislyn, though her mark more often granted ‘different’ treatment rather than ‘better’. She was more prone to illusions that only seemed to haunt her, or ones specifically thrown in her path. She’d woken up in another being’s body, been sent down paths that only led to the temple when she hadn’t visited in awhile. She’d been asked to cure curses and been prodded like a scientific experiment on display. Her mark had been a source of private, selfish pride, and a sort of mourning as well. Her mark, when her being was boiled down to its very basic form, was really all she had.

Looking from the water to the drawing, Aislyn dragged her eyes over the lines. She had always been able to see through her illusions, but if she simply didn’t try to, it was easier to allow herself to be fooled. Gradually, as she thought, the small lines on the pages began to come to life, rippling like the real thing. The flames flickered below the cracks in the water’s surface, like a campfire lit to warm the fish at the bottom of the waterbed. Or a funeral pyre, mourning those foolish enough to go for a swim. A bonfire, for the tale of Verlyna’s lust for power to be told. Her eyes moved over the picture slowly, her gnosis warming the charcoal lines to the touch of her illusions. The trees that sat on the banks swayed in the wind, the leaves rippling like the water that reflected them.
It had been an interesting concept, to use her illusionism on a work of art. It would make her work more profitable, label it as an ‘oddity’ in a city where oddities sold best. But the illusions wouldn’t last, and that would result in more than one unhappy customer. She had no way to make her illusions last longer than a day at most. With her second mark, she was free of the hourly schedule she’d been forced into before, but her power was not infinite. Her devotion to Ionu had to be definite, each night her thoughts dedicated to reconnecting with Ionu before she went out again.

Aislyn’s life worked like clockwork; she woke up, dressed herself as Maya before going about her daily existence. Drawing, painting, exploring the city. If the day were a multiple of five, she dressed as Anjani, donning her bow and sword and spending the day pretending she was worthy enough to exist alongside those far more honorable than herself. Each day would end, and she would return, wash her hands and face in the basin of water. If it were dirty, she’d toss it out, refilling it at a well, or bath or spring. Then she would sit, on a chair or her bed, leaning back and staring at the ceiling until the sunset. Sometimes she would eat, sometimes she didn’t feel the motivation for it. Her mother came home around that time, bringing with her stories of the carving shop that day. Then her mother would sleep a sound, silent sleep until the morning dawned again. When the day went dark, Aislyn would lie in bed until she knew it was useless to try to sleep anymore. Then the night would begin, a cloak wrapped around her shoulders and a new face donned. She would walk, then, walk without an aim or purpose along the darkened streets. The night was quieter than the day, and it was rare that Thief would speak at all during those times. She’d walk around the city, letting Ionu guide her way, until she met her house again, knowing that to be a sign from the city to attempt rest once again.
Then, and only then, she would sleep.

Aislyn had noticed how routine she’d become when her pattern had been disrupted by the winter, the utter chaos forcing her to compensate with a repetitive, predictable form for a good season and a half now. She’d tried to busy her worries away, but when her only good ability was her skill with a charcoal, it was hard. Everything was hard.

Realizing her sight had glazed over, Aislyn refocused her eyes to find the illusions that had danced over her drawing had stilled, returning to the motionless sketch they had been before. Sighing, she rolled her aching wrist. She felt like the day should be over, yet Syna still hung high in the sky. She felt like she’d done enough, yet she only had one drawing for the day. She felt like she should have finished bells ago, yet there she was, leaning against a tree, with a drawing of a pond. She would need to visit her home again that day, check the mailbox for commissions or requests. She’d need to begin what work had already piled up, complete what she’d started. But, for the moment, she rested, staring down into the waters of Verlyna’s pond, wondering at the fire that formed images below the surface. They were like clouds, each curl of the flame licking up into different, recognizable appearances. She could see people, see animals, see buildings and nonsensical shapes. Then she returned to her sketchbook, turning the page to be met with yet another blank canvas.

There was much work to be done.

[1,061]