Death, destruction, suffering.
I took a deep breath. I'd be okay. I wasn't alone.
I opened my mind. The world outside. The in-between of the layers. The million-piece puzzle assembled beyond. The way the magic enfolded in on itself and let me push the ferals between layers and into other worlds.
I touched my dry brush to the canvas and let it glide along while I imagined it.
The way I just knew where magic was happening, the way the map looked from the book, the feel of the magic as it arced from the earth—like a well-spring with spread tendrils hooked over the world, waiting to be tapped.
And the other things...the way that Stavros felt controlling me, that hollow inside, the way it felt to have Raphael use the box, how my magic was pulled from me, how I needed to figure out how to overcome that, the memories of Raphael in the Excelsine yearbooks, the look in Stavros' eyes, Kaine's shadows parasitically dipping inside, a distant recording of the Breaking, being inside Kinsky's painting, how the world opened like a million stars zooming in to form constellations of knowledge.
Paint was now on my brush, pulling from me, and it was gliding along the page, bursting life into the nooks and crannies of the canvas, bleeding its message into the cracks and over the statements.
It choked and pulled my brush in madly swirled midnight strokes. Blue, black, purple, brown death. Streaks of white lightning and crimson blood. Creation and life. A nightmare of slashing color and fiber. I'd constructed each of the fibers in this brush with assistance from Delia, and there was always an edgy quality to everything that Delia made—a bitterness with the world that was reflected in the layer upon which I stood.
But that wasn't the only edged thing in my life. Strange dreams haunted my wakening thoughts; dreams of destruction and despair. Gruesome images that spilled out onto the canvas beneath my brush.
Each carefully applied layer of flowers and birds became a disemboweled nightmare spilled upon the blackened grass.
I dropped my brush to the cloth and planted my palm against the canvas. Immediately, flowers bloomed, animals rose, creation unfolded, the landscape lit with life and promise, bursting at the seams. But like all the others, the longer I held on, the longer I pressed, the decay started to occur, and there was nothing I could do to prevent it, except wait for my magic to power the next cycle.
It was a continually looping piece of beautiful creation and horrific destruction, and the endless cycle and unity between the two.
If I let go, it would still happen, just on a slower time scale. I could never stop the cycle from occurring. I could only slow or hasten it. I twisted my fingers, pausing it at the height of creation, then ripped my hand away.
I stood with my head down, panting breaths heaving from my chest, up my throat, and through my mouth. The paint was still there, inside, but when I wiped my lips, I tasted power.
“Well...that was...enlightening,” Constantine said.
I jerked around.
Constantine's brows lifted, easing the oddly troubled expression on his face into more familiar lines. “Forgot I was here?” His words were sardonic, but his gaze softened. He motioned. “Come on, then.”
I stumbled over and buried myself in his chest. Neph's magic smoothed over me along with Constantine's. It was both a balm to my system and a small shock every time. The sharing was a superior level of trust from Neph to Constantine—a level of trust that had prompted one of the Bandits to mutter the Second Layer equivalent of hell freezing over.
I could feel Constantine looking at the painting. “It's not...completely horrible,” he said, as the decay slowly sped up again.
I laughed around a hiccup. “It's horrible.”
And the worse thing was it wasn't even as bad as the others I’d done. The creation cycles had lasted longer this time.
“It's mostly horrible, yes. In a beautiful, terrifying kind of way. Did you have to mix everything with so much black for the end?”
It made me think of Raphael's remark so long ago, when he'd been my false art teacher—that there was no true black in nature.
“Do you think everyone has a core of something good within them?” I asked into his shirt.
“No.”
At his succinct answer, I curled my fingers in his coat. “No?”
“Some people are rotten all the way through.”
“And some people seem that way, but aren't,” I said, nudging him with a small amount of magic.
He said nothing for a few moments, then, “Perhaps it is best to judge by emotions that you identify with strongly. Like love. If someone has experienced love, loved someone else, something in them, somewhere, is capable of more. But those born without...”
“Raphael was born with plenty of love. He was tainted, twisted.” I gripped harder, letting the comforting magic from Neph and Constantine, along with all the others, increase. “Do you think he could be good again?”
I felt him force himself to loosen from the automatic stiffness his body had assumed. “You test me with such questions.”
“If I get taken, if I get turned—”
“You think yourself like Verisetti.”
“You know him—on paper, you probably know him better than anyone who didn't know him personally. You've researched him. Without bringing an emotional reaction into it, don't you see the parallels?”
“I've long seen the parallels,” he said quietly. “Why do you think I try to keep you from their grasp?”
“Do you think Enton Stavros has a thread of goodness within?”
“I have seen no evidence of such.” Unlike the hot rage felt for Raphael, Constantine expressed only cold certainty discussing Stavros.
“But Professor Stevens...she's good.” I reluctantly let go, not wanting to suck away all his magic.
“A positive can be born of a negative. And Stevens has her own demons to deal with. As do most of us.” Constantine looked at the magic still faintly silhouetting his hand. “I can see why the governments keep the muses chained. Yours is powerful.”
“She willingly gives her magic to you.”
He didn't say anything for a long moment, face unreadable. “Yes. Your lunacy is spreading.”
I patted his shoulder. “You are a good sort.”
“I take comfort in the fact that your raw power will soon overwhelm the need to correct your inability to distrust appropriately.”
“Hilarious.”
He walked to stand in front of my painting again. “The truth is in front of me.”
“It is as I said. Death and destruction.”
“You feel the weight of the world.” He murmured, tilting his head to get a different view of the darkness I had carved into the fibers—a darkness that was shifting and pulling, inviting the viewer inside the tumult. “Literally, as it were. I can see a crumbling globe there with five rotational lines.”
I didn't look at the canvas. I didn't need to.
There was something off about his expression, though, as he looked at my painting. There was a tightness and an immense sorrow.
“You don't need to save the world, darling.”
“I know.”