Chapter Text
The artist stood before the burning ruin.
It wouldn't be long before it surrendered entirely to ash, before the wooden beams gave their last groaning protests and collapsed in showers of sparks upon the stone floors that had once borne the quiet weight of his work.
The winds moved through the broken windows , worrying the flames into brighter fury. They carried with them the warmth of summers long ago—long afternoons when light pooled and dust drifted lazily through the golden shafts.
Clays, canvases, paints, silvers, and golds—all that had once distinguished themselves by texture and sheen—burned now with equal flame. Orange and red raged against the swallowing dark, pouring from the building's ribs and reaching outward, as though desperate to make the whole horizon its accomplice; desperate to perpetuate the size it had amassed to.
Nobody had come to douse the flames.
No bucket brigade, no distant bell, no hurried cry. The world beyond the smoke remained stubbornly indifferent, as though the ruin were merely another sunset passing unremarked.
He thought of the hours entombed within those walls; the patient shaping of wet earth beneath palms, the ache in his back from leaning too long over a canvas, the soft rasp of brush against gesso, the metallic scent of filings when working silver into filigree. Every mistake had once felt catastrophic; every success, immortal. Now the fire rendered verdict upon them all without discrimination. Masterpiece and failure collapsed together in the same bright tongue of heat.
The fire did not dare touch him, though it leaned close, its breath hot and insinuating.
Yet he felt already undone. To be made of flesh—to bruise, to err, to grieve—was humiliation enough. Soot clung in dark tributaries along the paths his tears had carved, tracing his grief. In his hands he held the sole thing he had salvaged: a face unevenly carved from stone. Bowing his head, he met its unchanged gaze.
It was heavier than he remembered. Or perhaps he was weaker.
The stone held the night's chill even as the blaze roared behind him, a small and stubborn refusal to participate in destruction. He cradled it not as a sculpture, but as one might cradle something once living—should have been living.
Where his trembling fingers clutched the rescued fragment, he traced its coarse features: a forehead sloping into brow; lower, to the faint crook in the bridge of the nose—was it a flaw, or a fidelity to a feature he had once known by heart?—then outward to cheeks that would never hollow with hunger or laughter. The skin would never bruise, never wrinkle, never warm. Beneath his thumb lay the suggestion of a mouth, curved into the ghost of a smile that would neither widen nor fade.
The artist remembered the day he had carved the curve, how he had stepped back from the block of stone and felt, for a trembling instant, that he had stolen something from time itself. As though he had cut a lily from its water without risking its rot. He had believed then that art could arrest loss—that by chiseling hard enough, precisely enough, to paint and extract reality onto a canvas, he could own time; he could bargain with mortality. Now the bargain lay exposed as wishful arrogance, burning behind him in beams and canvas and gold leaf.
A beam gave way with a great sigh leaving a column of sparks rushed upward startling the dark. The roof sagged inward, and with it the last silhouette of the studio he had known. Heat pressed against his back, urging him to turn away, to abandon witness.
He did not move, he wept instead.
In the wake of his weeping, vision sharpened rather than blurred. Through tears, he saw what was no longer there; the easel by the window, the stool worn smooth by years of use, the unfinished canvases waiting with patient accusation, the hushed solace in the presence of the figure seated beside him. The absence itself before him more vividly than presence ever had.
And in the stone face—so unyielding, so serenely untouched—he saw at last what he had been trying to preserve. Not youth, nor beauty, nor even a single beloved likeness, but the fragile insistence that something might remain when all else succumbed.
The face had never been clearer. It seemed almost to forgive him.
And as the last of the upper windows burst outward in a rain of embers, he understood with a clarity that felt almost merciful; that the fire was not merely consuming timber and linen, but the years he had mistaken for permanence.
Each crack and collapse marked erasure; the winter the artist had worked in gloves with the fingertips cut away; the spring that rain had tapped insistently at the panes when he labored over a commission that would never be collected; the far away summer evening when laughter—his—that should have been witness to hanging canvases—instead it settled like varnish over everything he touched thereafter.
How small those moments had seemed when they were present, how inexhaustible. He had postponed experiencing it as one postpones sleep, all in favour to capture for himself, to experience it some other time when he was unbothered by time's demand. Confident that there would always be another hour, another day, another gentle reprieve in which to say what ought to be said.
Now the flames translated his delay into smoke. The heat swelled and receded in great breaths, as if the building itself were alive and suffering, and he found himself counting those breaths, irrationally hoping for one that would not come, one that would signal endurance instead of ending.
Yet the rhythm faltered. In the same stutter that he had once failed to reach, once laying there quietly upon the bed and left waiting for a return that would never be witnessed.
The structure bowed, dignified even in surrender, and released a final shudder that traveled through the ground. Its creation had never been a fortress against loss, only a lamp held briefly against encroaching dark. It had illuminated his love, yes—but it had never promised to keep it.
Behind the artist, the ruin settled into embers.
Before him, the night stretched immense and indifferent.
Between the two, the artist stood with ash on his cheeks and stone in his hands, feeling, for the first time, the terrible and tender weight of what endures—and what does not.