Death After Death
Chapter 248: Interconnectedness

That first day, all Simon did was gather some basic materials. It took a lot to make any art, but a large-scale mural didn’t just take paints and brushes; it took scaffolds and walls of appropriate size. He was given no direction as to where or how large he should make the thing, which were considerations almost as important as the subject matter involved.

After wandering down the narrow streets of the cramped city, he finally decided to use the exterior wall of a large storehouse. It wasn’t very exciting and was visible from nowhere important, but it was the largest visible canvas from the place where all the acolytes swam each morning, and since he’d decided that they were his true audience, that was the correct choice.

That night, he showed his project to Zoa, Kristos, and a few of the others. He also explained the vision he’d had that morning.

A few were visibly inspired by that. Iros just laughed. “But you haven’t done any painting at all!”

“Nor shall I for a good while, I think. These projects take time,” Simon agreed.

Later that night, when they were alone, Zoa asked him how he knew all these things. “No matter what they have you do, you’re already half an expert. How do you know all these things?”

“Oh, there’s plenty of things I don’t know about,” he said, trying to think of one.

“Plenty, huh?” she rolled her eyes as she stripped off her robe, making concentration that much harder.

“Winemaking!” he said finally. “I have no idea how to make wine, or beer for that matter.”

“No?” she teased, leaning closer. “Sadly, I can’t teach you those skills, but I might still know one or two things you don’t…”

“Like what?” he breathed, entranced by her sudden sensuality in the cramped half-dark room.

The only answer she gave to the question was a kiss. Well, it wasn’t the only answer, but it was the first answer. As the night went on, there was very little sleeping, but there was even less talking. Still, in the morning, when he woke up to the distant gong, he was refreshed and inspired.

That was also when he found that his robe had been replaced with a new one, one shade lighter, which surprised him. Despite the fact that he’d done no painting and hadn’t even gone to bed in his own room, someone had still decided to replace it with one that was a single shade short of the pure white robes that the priests wore.

“You just can’t stop, can you?” Zoa asked with a smile as he got dressed.

“You know I have no say in any of this,” Simon said, pausing what he was doing to admire her sprawled form. “I just… this place is helping to calm me down, you know?”

“You didn’t feel very calm last night…” Zoa answered, trying to tempt him back to bed with her. She almost succeeded, too; only the fact that he knew she was worried about losing him soon let him see through her beguiling illusion.

Simon reassured her that he wasn’t going anywhere, and eventually, the two of them got up to start the day, even though they were very nearly the last people in line for once. That day continued just like the previous one had. Simon spent three days building scaffolding from fence posts, spare bamboo, and other cast-offs before he was even ready to start whitewashing the canvas. Each day, he made so little progress that at the morning roll call, he kept expecting someone to tell him to go and milk goats instead since he clearly wasn’t getting any painting done.

After a week, he had a large white rectangle that was ten feet tall and twenty-five feet wide, and after two, he had a few sketchy lines to break his pristine canvas apart and a few blocky areas shaded in the earth tones he planned to use there. Still, despite all the progress, it didn’t look like much to everyone else, and though people tried to guess what it was he was painting, no one was close.

That was by design, of course; very few of the swaths of tan and ocher that he was painting would be anything until he added the slender black lines he had planned, but that wouldn’t be for a while. Without an assistant, he had to grind all of his own paints himself, and between that manual labor and the frequent trips further down the mountain for certain clays, he spent much more time not painting than he did painting.

Still, amidst all of this thankless prep work and mundanity, he occasionally glimpsed moments of that same connection he’d felt on the cliff the other day. It wasn’t common, and as soon as he noticed it, it was gone, but it was real, just the same. He knew it was.

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He could feel it when someone was about to interrupt him, and he knew just where to put a line even though there were no marks on his canvas yet to guide him. It was somewhat like the opposite of déjà vu. Rather than remembering he’d already done something before, he felt certain that he knew what he was about to do was correct.

No, not correct, perfect. It was exactly the right thing, and it resonated through him sometimes, even in the smallest tasks. In fact, they were more common then. If he was trimming a brush or going out to gather the ingredients to make his paints, he was far more likely to feel that way than if it was something that mattered more.

Those trips were fairly frequent, though. He went all over the mountain for certain colors. Sulfur, harvested from the lake itself, gave him a source of strong yellows, and the mountain had plenty of browns, yellows, and oranges. It even had some reds with a little work, but blue was entirely absent, and since he needed that for the sea, he was finally forced to use a word of earth to create lapis lazuli out of other more common ores.

That was interesting. It was the first word of power he’d used in years, and though it was more bitter and smokey to say that normal, the way it rippled through him felt even stranger. Though he got the rocks he wanted, he was left feeling almost tainted. No one else in his life said anything, but the way that the Priest looked at him the following morning was enough to assure Simon that it wasn’t just in his head.

He didn’t feel quite right for days and weeks after that single spell, and none of his little moments of clarity started to reassert themselves until long after the blue stones had been ground into powder, the ocean was painted, and the mural as a whole was almost done.

So magic and enlightenment are mutually exclusive, huh? He asked himself one day when he was trying to meditate on what all of this meant. That would certainly be a good reason for the population to see it as evil. I’d probably see it that way, too, if I could see everything, and all it took was a spell to make me blind.

Simon gave that a lot of thought as his painting was approaching its end. If the ability to see magic and use it were mutually exclusive, then was that the reason why the Unspoken didn’t use words of power whenever possible? Magic items didn’t seem to cause the same problems, which made Simon think that it was more of a pragmatic choice than a dogmatic one.

Still, he didn’t let that distract him from his art any more than stray thoughts about Seyom or his doppelgänger. Focus, as much as anything else, was a key component of clarity, and Simon was determined not to backslide any more than he already had.

What he was painting started out as a map. Many of his largest murals often were. It was a repeating theme for him when he was trying to depict something too large to comprehend. Well, that and a chance to show off my map-making skills, he thought to himself. His paintings were almost certainly more accurate than the maps hanging in the castles of various rulers in the region. He didn’t expect his audience to know that, though, and he never told them.

Sometimes, Priests would come up to him and ask him about his progress, but these were always subjective questions. “How does the painting make you feel?” or “Are you happy with your progress?” were the most common.

Simon answered in many different ways before he settled on, “Its coming into focus, slowly”

The map itself didn’t matter in this case, and even though the location of the mountains and cities was accurate, they were soon lost as he painted several more layers over them. First, the continents and the oceans became a flock of birds of every type he could think of, and then, after he filled the blank space between them with artful air currents, he painted over all of that a second time, reducing everything to a series of tightly interconnected lines.

Those first two versions took less than a month, but the third version took several months as he recontextualized the whole thing. He wasn’t trying to create a world map made from birds. He was trying to make an image that looked like that single glorious glimpse of the currents he’d had that morning, and that could only be accomplished with thousands of tiny little lines coming together to form an unexpected image of a deeper whole.

When he was finally done and took down his scaffolding, it didn’t look like much up close. His friends were fond of telling him that as they celebrated the completion. When he took Zoa to the cliffs they would normally dive off of afterward, though, the image he’d been trying to make was clear.

Well, at least it was as clear as any image like this one could be. From a distance, it was very nearly holographic and had come out better than he’d hoped. Though the second layer was painted in high detail, the thousands of tiny gold and black lines that practically took it over made it almost shift beneath your eyes. From this distance, it wasn’t much bigger than a postcard, but while you looked, you could see Ionar become a series of gulls or Brin burst apart into eagles and ravens.

Honestly, it was probably the first piece of modern artin the world, but to him, it was more than that. It was not just the world he lived in. It was the world he was constantly changing. He’d only put a few thousand square miles on the painting. It was barely the size of Europe, and he knew that there had to be other lands out there, but for now, it was the world that was his canvas, not the other way around.

“Oh, Simon, It’s lovely,” Zoa insisted. “How did you even imagine something like that?”

“I didn’t imagine it,” he said. “I glimpsed it one morning, and hopefully, that image will help other people to see what I saw, even a little.” She was satisfied with that answer, at least in part, and for now, he was satisfied, too.

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