1.1 — The Astronaut (Blood on the Marshes)

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How’s the waste of time? 

I’m already staring at my card of linked paper when the words appear, because I have nothing else to do. A few drops of water hit the card from seemingly nowhere, soon followed by drawn circles and little arrows. The fish are getting agitated, see? Get back already. I think they miss you. 

I let out a laugh. Really? I write back with a fountain pen, right underneath. It’s not you who misses me?

While I wait for the response, I hear some laughter from the hall. Behind me, a thick black curtain blocks light and gazes. I’m not supposed to be bothered at my work, so the large mural I’m working on, as well as myself, are hidden away. Otherwise, ‘things could go awry’. Well, that’s what the hospital staff claims, although being hidden from view suits me too.

That way they don’t know I’m scamming them.

I watch my animated dragon fly little rounds across its area of influence. Carved out of enchanted softwood, it keeps my utensils suspended in the air—a few bubbles of water for mixing and cleaning, a range of ink brushes, ink sticks, a wooden cup of varnish solvent, and a palette. The dragon makes sure to nudge items back towards the center whenever they threaten to fall out of range. It’s more of a mess than I usually keep when I’m actually working. A little chaos helps keep up appearances.

Two bright beams of enchanted oak float along the top and bottom of the enchanted mural I came here to service. Well, I say ‘mural’, even though technically I painted it on resistant paper sheets infused onto the wooden surface. Still, it can’t be removed from the wall.

Twelve steps wide, and four steps high. It took me a thousand hours to paint. 

I look back at my linked card. Mem still hasn’t responded. I can’t get back yet, I write under our conversation. I still need to play pretend for another day or two.

No you don’t, the response reads. It’s quick this time. I guess she just didn’t like what I wrote before. Just tell them the truth. The painting doesn’t need servicing.

And break their brains? I shoot back. No thank you.

Are you sure you don’t just want to have more fun with that receptionist? the response reads, and I know Mem is being tongue-in-cheek.

I roll my eyes. She can be such a brat. As much as I like ‘that receptionist’, I’d rather lie in bed at home with Mem. And she knows that. They both do.

“Klefkia?”

The curtain shuffles aside, and the devil makes her way in. Pia, ‘that receptionist’. She’s wearing a fancy black dress. An enchanted maple hair pin makes her locks float like they’re underwater—dark, wavy hair that frames her pale face. Pia likes to interrupt my work, and I let her, because she’s charming. She grins at me as I quickly hide the linked paper in my breast pocket. Then she laughs.

“How come I always find you distracted? If I didn’t know any better, I’d think you’re not doing any work whatsoever.”

I chuckle too. “Really?” I throw a brush I was holding into the dragon’s space, where it lands firmly in the largest bubble of water. A few droplets slosh away. The dragon has difficulty catching them in time. “Does it not look like I’m busy?” 

The grin on her face fades into a warm smile. “Don’t worry, I was just teasing. I know you’d never endanger anyone.”

“Don’t be too kind to me,” I tell her. I pick up the brush again, drying it off with a cloth before leaving it all with the floating dragon. Mild pain stings my left hand from the movements, and Pia catches me rubbing my fingers against the base of my thumb.

“Everything alright?” she asks, still that glowing affection in her voice.

I look down at my hands. They are covered in bright rainbow-coloured splatters, as if I’d dunked them in a bucket of unmixed paint. The mess climbs up to my elbows, then thins out into spotty splashes somewhere around my upper arms. A bad case of painter’s hands.

These spots—that’s what they are called colloquially, and I’ve always loved the term—will never come off. Turns out, S-grade pigment is quite persistent.

“I’m fine,” I answer. “They just prickle. It’ll wane when I apply the ointment back at the hostel.” It’s a weekly thing, and the week is up. It might have been up yesterday… or the day before. I don’t quite remember. Mem keeps track for me at home, but I didn’t want to tell her I forgot the date now that I’ve been out.

“Alright. Let me know if you need anything.” Pia approaches me to cup my cheek, and I relish under her touch. Her thumb grazes beneath my right eye, finding two more spots of permanent red. She holds my gaze for a few seconds before turning to the painting—always does, she really likes it. Takes it in with awe and admiration that makes my stomach flutter every time. “I’m sad your hands cause you pain, but still… It’s all proof that you create things like this. Both the most dangerous object in Mial, and one of the most lifesaving.”

She has a cute flair for the dramatic.

Forest at Fright. A painting to collect anxiety. Red eyes of a monster stare back from a deep and dark abyss. Bloodied claws to the lower right, subtle, only visible on second glance. Then, at third glance, fading into its fur, the silhouette of an unnervingly calm person, hands leaning against the monster’s front leg. As if the creature will let loose on the viewer the moment that hand lowers. While a motive like this might usually invoke fear, I turn it to anxiety with the medium: watercolour, dousing the composition in a layer of dreaminess and abstraction, the forest dispersing into fuzzy clouds at the edges. Then, a thick varnish on top to protect the more fragile paint layer.

When I don’t answer, she keeps going: “I talked to a woman earlier who’s been here for a few weeks, waiting for surgery on her heart. Before you came here, she was pushing her uneasiness into the painting every evening. It helps her sleep. She says it’s fun to live out the anxiety by pretending that she falls prey to your painting for a bit.”

I nod. The enchantment on this painting works through catharsis, rather than dispersal.

“People can’t wait for you to be done, you know?” Pia says next, and that line stings a little.

I take a moment to consider, and then decide to just go for it.

“Can I tell you a secret?”

She raises her eyebrows in curiosity, the sudden stillness of her body making her hair float around.

I take a breath, then gesture to the mural. “If someone needs it, just let them behind the curtain. They can use it.”

She watches me for a moment. Her fingers knead into her upper arms. Though I think she’s more confused than anything. “I wouldn’t want to be the reason someone gets hurt, or trapped in a maze of magic,” she murmurs.

“You won’t be.” I look back at the looming prowler on the painting. “It’s not dangerous,” I say. “It’s inert.”

Pia lets out a huff of air and makes me look back at her. Her worry is gone. Instead, she grins, her smile infectious. Her entire body swoops sideways as she lets herself go. “Really, Klefkia? Then why did you spend the last five days servicing it?” She says it not like a question, but like a gotcha. As if that proved me wrong.

“If I recall, I didn’t quite spend all of the last five days servicing it.” I shoot her a meaningful glance. She let me spend the night at her place twice, for fun. “But either way, don’t worry about it. If someone needs it, please just let them use it.”

Her shoulders twitch upward as she sobers up. She’s still smiling gently, but no longer grinning. “If I was worried, I wouldn’t be around.”

“And here I was, thinking you stayed so you’d get to see me again,” I joke.

“You are a pleasure of a woman to be around,” she teases, “but perhaps a few nights per year are not quite enough to warrant retaining an entire occupation.”

I bite my lip to quell a smile and pick up an ink brush to continue my ‘work’. 

We fall silent for a while; we often do when she comes to bother me, because she gets lost in my piece. That’s what it exists for, of course. It flushes the viewer’s worry through a meticulous root-based drainage system out to several plazas and gathering spots across Mial. A city with over fifty thousand inhabitants. The remaining concentration of anxiety is too low to harm the mood of plaza visitors, it’s like a drop of acid in the ocean. 

“So…” I can hear in her voice which topic she’s about to broach. “Have you given it some thought?”

I bite my lips, tempted to fetch my deck of painted cards to push my sudden disquiet away. But that would be a bit overt.

“I’m not sure,” I say slowly.

Pia wants me to draw a picture of her and her wife, in their garden. My only experience meeting Pia’s wife was in Pia’s bed, where she’d been quite gentle. So, the issue isn’t that she’s asking me to paint this. The problem is time. I’m stretched thin.

All of us S-grade painters are. There simply aren’t enough of us around anymore to take care of the just short of two thousand S-grade paintings that haven’t gone extinct yet.

“So… that’s a no?” She arches her eyebrows. 

“It’s a ‘maybe’,” I answer. I do like her. I do like her wife. And it would just be an A-grade painting. Maybe I can squeeze it into the schedule. “I’ll see what I can do.”

“And then I’ll get to see you more often, when you come to service it?” she jests with a smile.

I shrug. “If you house me for it, sure, I’ll do it.” It would probably be fun. “But it won’t be required.”

“Uhm…” She looks uncertain. It makes sense. It’s unusual. She gestures to the Forest at Fright. “But you service this one.”

I smile. “I sure do.”

It’s precisely because painters have been stretched so thin since I was little that I’ve developed ways to make my works last.

At that thought, a marbled emperor moth look-alike flutters in from the slit above the curtain. I sigh again, and start cleaning my brush. Looks like I’m done here for the day—because while my paintings last, others don’t. Pia lets the moth land on her arm.

It unfolds neatly, leaving a wrinkled sheet of sending paper.

“The Astronaut,” she reads off it. She frowns, then says, “At the—”

“Harbour, I assume. Want to come with me?”

Pia gives me a sad look. “I’m working.”

I knew, but I like seeing her yearn a little.

She smiles. “But I can accompany you out.”

It takes me around five minutes to gather up my supplies and get changed. I leave most things behind, but my satchel neatly stores what I need in an expedition: a containment gourd, several pages of soaking paper, palette and brushes, as well as a weapon.

After I remove the last item from its sphere, my dragon lands to perch on my shoulder. Quirks like this can’t be controlled by the enchanter, so I really lucked out here. It’s adorable.

“You seem in good spirits,” Pia observes. “I thought closing expeditions were dangerous?”

That fact that she notices flusters me. “They can be. But I’m good at it, and… well. I assume my partner will be too.”

“Partner?”

I nod. “Closing expeditions are usually performed in teams of two.”

The hospital grounds are calm this evening, a soft spring breeze playing with the leaves as we pass under a willow. People gather in the meadows between buildings—mostly children. A woman in a floating chair nods at me as I pass; it feels like she recognises me. Perhaps from an old newspaper article? I’m not famous nowadays by any means, but I’ve had some spotlight as a teenager.

“Why teams of two?”

I shrug. “Not a lot of people with the expertise, so we take as few as we can get away with. And that’s two. One to take care of the painting, and one to take care of the monsters.”

“And you’ll take care of the painting.”

I nod again. 

Pia walks me down the grass path next to the thin, red line of pavement that denotes the tram routes. Just then, one of them emerges from behind the building to my right. I pull out my fan to signal the conductor to stop for me.

“Take care, darling. Stay safe.”

I kiss Pia goodbye. 

The tram floats into motion soon after I board it. Watching the world move by has always let me sort my thoughts. It helps with solving riddles—riddles of broken paintings, for the most part.

Because every now and then, they bleed. The magic of a painting goes awry, the paint cracks. Crystallised magic spills into the real world. If neglected for too long, those bleedings can kill. Will kill. So we go and fix them.

I take out my linked card again. It’s slightly damp to the touch, and empty. Mem must have washed it—that implies she wants to talk more, and made space for us. Sadly, I’ll be busy now.

Got called, I tell her. The ink seeps into the paper with tiny fuzzes.

Ah, she answers. Bad one?

I ponder the question. The Astronaut—a scientific-era S-grade painting from 749, meaning it’s slowly approaching its two-hundredth anniversary. A painting of loneliness.

But there’s a problem.

As far as I remember, The Astronaut was last serviced four years ago, by Lithmantia, of all people. Generally regarded as one of the most capable painters of our time. She added a faint crescent earth as a stabilising secondary focal point. A genius move. The painting is in frequent use too, being a supporting artwork in the peninsula’s largest marine cargo vessel. In other words, it shouldn’t be causing issues. Well-maintained paintings rarely do.

I keep staring at her words. Bad one?

Yes, I eventually write.

I rub my fingers against the base of my thumb. My hands burn a little more now that I know they won’t be receiving the ointment tonight, either. But I’ll let them grouse. The expedition will make up for it. Even more so if it’s difficult. Even more so if it’s big. I can’t help but smile. I wonder who I’m paired with today.

But not for long. 

A mile before we arrive at the harbour, she enters.