Work Text:
He starts the canvas exactly one month after his wife’s death.
When so much else fades, the contours of her face, the sound of her voice, his own name, somehow, this stays with him.
It starts as a simple piece. “Draw your emotions,” his doctor had said. “It can help.”
And so he does - twirling, amorphous streams of consciousness and color that pour out of him like blood fill the empty space in beautiful, terrible, wonderful dancing abstraction.
He’s not sure if it helps, but it certainly doesn’t hurt. At least, not yet.
The landscapes come next. His wife had always loved mountains. At least, he thinks she did. Or does he just remember the rhythm of her shorter stride trying to match his longer gait as they walked up rocks, before laying entangled in each other beneath the open sky once they’d reached the top?
He remembers that she had spoken to the trees, to the mountains, to the animals around them, although he cannot remember what she said. She was never a Painter in the capital-P sense, but she painted people into the world around her with her words. “Mother Earth” “Grandfather Mountain” “Auntie River.”
It makes sense, then, that he does the same to the hills and valleys of this canvas. Titans, he calls them, great rock figures that cradle everything that he pours into the world, and are cradled back in turn.
And it is simple. And it is good. In the beginning, it had been good.
Hadn’t it?...Hadn’t it?
~
People often joke about art taking on a life of its own. Characters who fight back against the story, who drift off the narrative path the writer wants to put them on. Or, in another sense, audience interpretation giving even simple sketches a life of their own. But most are not Painters. Most do not know the extent to which this can literally be true.
He is not sure when the Titans evolve from passive subjects of his painting into creatures who can shape the canvas in their own right, their very blood turning into fresh, icy-blue chroma.
He should have shut it down, should have wiped them from the canvas or turned them back into something purely decorative, something benign, powerless.
But it was nice, not creating alone.
Perhaps this is when it started.
~
It does not take long for the Titans to start crafting their own creations, rather than simply moving a mountain, widening a river, changing the arch of cliffs along an ocean. The Titans see these beings that totter about doing their bidding as little more than extensions of themselves, but isn’t that true of all creation, to a certain extent? Perhaps they are simply more honest about it.
He doesn’t remember if they start out as dwarves or if they are moulded, over time, by the stories he was told in his childhood, stories that allow children of the stone to only be one thing, really.
Regardless, it is soothing to watch them scurry about like ants creating wonders of this world, while he can rest, while he can let himself merely float.
Perhaps this is where it started.
~
It should not surprise him that his original children, the outpouring of colors and forms carved from the emotions of his heart, eventually want to create, too.
He has neglected them. He wants to tell himself that it is good, that it is right, that he no longer feels compelled to purge the wounds of his soul anymore. But on the rare occasions he does look at them, there are more and more that he does not remember, that he no longer has a word for. One by one they fade from the canvas or are absorbed into the backdrop. He feels less and less these days.
More traditional forms would offer them a permanence, a stability, they say, more than the flowing blur of brushstrokes that they currently inhabit. Faces would be easier for him to remember, they argue, easier to keep.
When had they gained the ability to argue?
He doesn’t like it, doesn’t like being directly addressed, acknowledged like this. The Titans are easy, silent partners in creation, demanding nothing from him as they go about their business.
Feel me, see me, love me, know me! the emotions wail at him, even as he floats, floats, floats.
Perhaps it is jealousy or perhaps it is fear that makes them turn on the Titans to gain their form. Clever creatures, his first children, realizing the power in chroma, although they call it lyrium and he doesn’t know why.
He’s destroyed canvases before - at least, he thinks he remembers doing so. But this is the first time a canvas has begun to destroy itself. The spirits of soon to be dead feelings carve themselves containers crafted by the blood of his own world. Do they choose elves in defiance of, in mockery of the things that have become dwarves or is it because his mind cannot conceive of a story that has one without the other?
He should step in, should set it right. It is only then that he realizes that, along with his ability to weep, he has forgotten how.
His paintbrush feels stale and stiff beneath his fingers. That is, when he can feel it at all.
~
Something is broken. Something is wrong. It would probably hurt if he could still feel something, anything. The emotions turned spirits turned elves think they were the ones to do it. Considering the brains of the operation had been, at one point, from a piece he’d labeled “Pride,” this assertion is unsurprising. And, who knows? Maybe he is right. Severing the Titans from themselves, locking away the dreams and ideas that had created them…He would be angry, if he could remember how. They took a piece of his wife away, a piece of himself away. And maybe it would hurt him more if he himself had not already started the process.
Whatever it is, it starts to poison the chroma. He’s painted violence before, painted what one might even call gore, but it’s nothing like the empty, hollowing, meaningless ruin that starts to overtake every inch of this world. There are few things worse than art without soul.
His canvas is rotting.
He wonders, vaguely, if, outside, his body is dying, if there is anyone to take care of him, now that his wife is dead.
Had they had children? Real, breathing, children born of bodies instead of paint? He doesn’t remember.
Soon after, he forgets about his outside body entirely.
~
He doesn’t remember when or why the humans show up. Had it been before or after his creations had fractured the painting still further, locking the emotions somewhere far away? Before or after the colors had begun to Fade, Fade, Fade?
He thinks maybe they had been an accident. His weak mind in its frazzled state had inserted them where they did not belong, like amateur painters in their first years of art school, locked in the shackles of painting what they know, of turning every piece into a portrait, even when such subjects were not needed.
It is ironic, then, how much more they love him than any of the others. “Maker!” they call him. “Maker!” they sing and shout and whisper, wretchedly into the dark. He wishes he could properly love them back.
They are not the first to reflect the sins of the outside world back at him, sullying this once simple, picturesque canvas. Poverty, war, slavery. The elves, birthed directly from his own emotions, had been the first to do that. He doesn’t like what that says about him. He likes the fact that this canvas, his canvas, insists it must be repeated with its version of humanity even less.
~
The Qunari are also a bit of a surprise. He doesn’t remember creating them, nor can he remember any outside source of inspiration through which they might have subconsciously slipped in, although that hardly means anything anymore.
Perhaps, like the elves, they had partially created themselves.
They claim to be from beyond the sea that borders the edge of the main continent on this canvas. Which is curious because, yes, there is a sea, but no it does not go anywhere. There is no other continent beyond the waves that lap at the edge of the frame. He had merely placed it there to create beaches to rest on and waters to swim in, not to necessarily lead to anything.
Curious.
Were he younger, more clear-headed, less broken, he would have investigated this marvelous mystery. Instead, he just waits and watches as more and more of them appear.
~
He hopes that, eventually, it will all even out. That the tumult that arose in the wake of the canvas slowly shredding itself to pieces would settle down.
It does not.
He himself has never been particularly good at respecting boundaries, so why would his creations be? They poke and prod at the barrier that Pride had created around the rotting Chroma, this menace they call the Blight, releasing it back into the larger confines of the canvas. It corrupts, warps, decays everything in its path. And even those it leaves untouched…he cannot help but notice they are faded, less vibrant than they once were.
He suspects it is the distance from his own emotions, those tethers to something Real, something True. For, in his attempt to lock away some, Pride has locked away everything, leaving the rest of the canvas’s inhabitants to essentially cannibalize themselves. Even the spirits that form in the world are not birthed from him, not really. They are born indirectly from these people who wander this increasingly ruined work. It’s all a copy of a copy of a copy.
He can hear a voice, that may once have been his teacher’s, but might just be his own, say, “It is all too easy to become too derivative.”
It’s dying. His canvas, his home is dying, it’s all dying, and he’s let himself go too much, too far. He cannot remember how to fix it.
~
What he does next is, perhaps, a bit cliche, but can he really be blamed?
(Yes, he can.)
He paints himself a wife.
He thinks she is, in some ways, like his first one, but it is hard to tell. In numbing himself so thoroughly over the years, he has, by extension, slowly erased her, too. He didn’t mean to. At least, he thinks he hadn’t meant to.
He cannot remember his first wife’s name. This one calls herself Andraste. Why his subconscious settled on that particularly obscure goddess will, perhaps, always remain a mystery. Regardless, it goes well at first. Well, goes well for him, at least. The poor girl’s life is a bit terrible at the beginning. And at the end. And at several points in the middle.
He explains things as best he can to one whose understanding of painting in even the traditional sense is rudimentary at best. They eventually stumble across a theory that part of the problem is that he no longer controls the majority of the Chroma in this canvas anymore, although she uses approximately none of those words, preferring phrases like “false gods” and “magic.” If they can just manage to wrestle back the Chroma from his creations, remind them all who the true Painter of their reality is, then that reality will become Truth and he can fix things again.
And when the Chant spreads across all four corners of the world,
Let it rise at last to the ears of the Maker.
Let Him hear our unwavering faith.
Let Him hear our righteous dedication and enduring perseverance.
And then shall the Maker return to us.
And then shall the Maker return to the BLack City in heaven.
And shall the Chant of Light make it pure.
It is not a bad plan, as far as these things go. But like everything else in his life, it goes up in flame.
He cannot dowse the fire, nor can he soothe her screams.
And it does hurt because he does love her, even if it’s just an echo of an echo of an echo.
He wishes he could have loved her more.
~
It is unsurprising that France eventually manages to find a way into this canvas. He had spent so many years of his tutelage there that the country lives beneath his skin in a way that the land of his birth never could. The opulence when you look up, the poverty when you look down. The delicious taste of flakey, buttered bread across his tongue, the assault of urine and feces against his nose.
Orlais, it calls itself, and it is just as beautiful and terrible as its predecessor. It and Tevinter, that horrific monument to the sins of the Roman Empire - another nation that somehow stays with him when the streets of his own neighborhood have faded - battle across his canvas, while other, smaller nations rear their heads here and there.
Against the backdrop of it all, the canvas rots and rots.
And he can do nothing.
~
They all have ideas about who he is, what he wants. It is so very convenient that it always seems to align with what the ruling members of their societies want at any given moment. However, he does wish that they would reach some sort of consensus across national boundaries, as well. It is deeply uncomfortable to be pulled this way then that.
Poor Andraste. He doubts she had foreseen the natural risk of the plan she had helped him craft. Of course, she hadn’t - for he himself had been oblivious to the dangers, and he was the Painter between the two of them.
Belief is a powerful thing, that much is true. But it is a power that pulls both ways.
More and more these days, he is left to wonder: Is he even painting them anymore or are they painting him?