The Vampire & Her Witch

”Don’t draw your horizon in the middle of the canvas,” Nyrielle said as she used her fingernail to draw a long, straight line two-thirds of the way up the canvas. Her hand was incredibly steady as she moved, and the resulting thin line of dark blue paint looked like it could have been drawn with a ruler, but when she did it, it looked effortless.

”Then you’re going to draw another line, very thin and a little wavy, towards the bottom of the canvas,” Nyrielle said, using the fingernail of her second finger to draw a serpentine, meandering line about a fifth of the way up the canvas.

”The first step is just to put paint on canvas,” she said, using her index finger to pick up a dab of bright, white paint, followed by a bit of deep, dark blue. ”You decide what color your sky is going to be, lighter or darker, overcast or clear, day or night,” she said as the tip of her finger traced slow, gentle circles in the paint, blending it until she found a shade of rich, cobalt blue, like the sky after sunset, just before the stars came out.

”Just blend until you like it,” she said, repeating words Tausau had said so long ago that they would have faded from any book they’d been written in. But those words were etched deeply in her heart. ”Then, fill the space above the horizon line,” she said, gently dabbing the paint onto the canvas with her finger before wiping her finger back and forth through the paint, evening out the texture.

”How do I make it grayer?” Ashlynn asked gently. She could hear the faint tremble in Nyrielle’s voice, and the slight flutter of her heartbeat as it echoed within her own chest. When Nyrielle said that she wanted to share something of herself, she hadn’t just meant the activity of painting, but so much more...

”I feel like painting a stormy sky,” Ashlynn explained, thinking that a churning, storm-tossed sea suited both of them right now. ”Not the sky when clouds cover everything like a blanket, but when the winds are high, and the rain is coming, and everything is a little bit patchy and turbulent,” she said, her fingers hovering over the shade of pale blue that she’d created while feeling that it didn’t quite encompass what she wanted.

”Balance the light with darkness,” Nyrielle said, using her pinky finger to point at the blob of black paint on Ashlynn’s palette. ”Almost as much black as white to create your gray, with the blue mixed in to bring it to life. And, if you can be very, very careful about the amount,” she said. ”Use just a tiny bit of yellow to give it a slight greenish hue.”

”Then, when you put the paint on the canvas, use your thumb,” Nyrielle said, scooping up a bit of paint on her thumb and using it to make broad, strong strokes across the canvas. ”Storms are heavy things, and they press down on us, so press the paint into the canvas, but let it build up the little ridges at the end of your strokes to give it some texture...”

As she spoke, Nyrielle could feel the weight of memories pressing down on her, and her heartbeat grew less stable in her chest.

”Your base layer must be smooth and even if you want to have any hope of controlling your final outcome,” an insistent voice echoed from her memories. ”None of this sloppy nonsense. Use a scrape if you must, but if you cannot do it with a brush, you will not hunt until you can. Or would you prefer to go back to finger painting with pricked fingers?”

”Nyri?” Ashlynn asked gently, looking up from her own canvas when she realized that Nyrielle had gone quiet. ”We don’t have to, if it’s hard,” she offered gently, reaching out with her clean hand and placing it on the small of Nyrielle’s back, stroking gently upward to the space between her shoulderblades where her wings would emerge.

”Just this much is already a moment to treasure,” Ashlynn added softly. ”Just like when you taught me how to swim in dreams, we can take it slow if it’s too much.”

”No, I’m fine,” Nyrielle said, flexing her fingers to dissipate the memory of the pain that had accompanied being forced to fingerpaint with her own blood until she agreed that she would never resort to crude techniques as ’short cuts’ or ’easier ways’ of achieving the result she wanted.

”Tausau taught me to paint from the heart,” Nyrielle said as her fingers began to move again, varying the pressure and darkness in her sky to breathe a bit of life into it, as if there were faint wisps of cloud across the sky that were too thin to see clearly, until a background of stars made their presence clear.

”He was my first teacher, and he made me love paint,” she said as she continued to work, using generous amounts of blue with tiny traces of yellow to create a deep, sea green as she moved down to create her ocean. ”I loved everything about it,” she added with a wistful smile. ”I loved getting messy, and I loved the smell of paints, and I loved making something where there had only been a blank canvas before...”

There had been a chest once, where her mother, Orla, kept the paintings she made when she was a child. Each month, Orla would ask her daughter to choose her very best painting, and she would add that one to the chest. Then, at the end of the year, she brought them all out again, stretching all the way back to Nyrielle’s very first painting, so she could see how much better she’d gotten.

”But which one is your favorite, mother?” Nyrielle had asked one year as she watched her mother handling each one as if it were a priceless treasure. ”What should I get better at?”

”You should get better at whatever makes you happy,” Orla said, ruffling her daughter’s hair and marveling at how much she had changed in what seemed like the blink of an eye. Time felt like it had stopped for her and her husband, Iarlaith, once they became vampires, but for their growing child, time seemed like it passed far too quickly, and soon, these precious moments would all be gone.

”But if you want to paint something just for me,” she added. ”I wouldn’t mind if you painted more flowers. Lavender or sweet pea, lilacs or primrose, you decide, I love them all,” she said warmly. ”So long as you’re happy painting them, I’ll always treasure them.”

The chest and the paintings it once held were long gone now, lost in the fires set by the Lothians when Cellach Lothian burned her parents as heretics and tried to lay waste to the Vale of Mists. By the time she’d returned to reclaim the only home she’d ever known, little remained of her art but scraps of scorched canvas and ash.

She hadn’t painted with fingers since then, she realized. Ever since she lost her first paintings, the ones that were expressive reflections of how she felt and how she saw the world around her, she’d been painting the way her second teacher taught her to.

Not because she wanted to, or because she thought it was a better way to paint... But because she finally understood what Shubnalu meant about painting the places and people that were lost forever, so that way, you wouldn’t be the only one who remembered what they looked like when everyone else who knew them had long ago died and turned to ash...