Willem feels better with his mask on, it is the simple truth. Such an interesting pathology, that. He muses as to when that actually became the way of things with him, but like so much else, it is lost in the labyrinth of his mind forever now. The maze peopled by slender, beautiful towers and precious little else.
Willem is painting again, here in his studio, the largest room in his white cathedral-turned-home. Gifted with an eye for architecture, and an engineer’s precision, as well as a mathematician’s sensibilities, Willem Murrel has instead always felt most at home, most himself with a brush in his hand and a canvas before him. He paints Amy again, his favorite. She sits posed near him, quiet and still.
His portrait-Amy sits facing away from his painter’s eye, brushing her long brunette hair before a mirror. She sits in a red room with a window over her shoulder. Her coloring favors red, after all. Amy is a young-enough girl, a human and simple, if austere, with a reserved beauty. She is vaguely reminiscent of someone else, in fact.
The portrait-Amy however resembles only one thing. Her face, seen only in the reflection of the mirror, is only bone. A skull with long flowing brown hair, portrait-Amy stares at what could be anything with her deep, dark, and empty sockets. The bone structure is a perfect match for our real-Amy. Willem might be insane, but he is also insanely gifted.
He whistles as he works, his oils staining over older and deeper stains already unmistakable on his apron and gloves. Willem paints often here in Belrael. He is chuckling, remembering some long-ago joke, his slender boar mask bobbing slightly with his amusement. His masked visage somehow conveying a world-weariness and some sardonic humor. His mind’s eye flits from portrait-Amy to the courtyards which give on Fleet Street. Afternoons beyond counting spent just off the shore of the blood-red river Thames. A glorious if dark place.
He slashes more color onto the walls of portrait-Amy’s red room and thinks on the Arabian, the devil in silken robes. He wishes for a moment that he could truly remember how he came here to Belrael, and whether the wizard is the cause. Should he be angered or thankful? What is the difference?
His off-hand moves in a delicate and precise pattern, and a small, grey winged man zips across the room, a goblet clutched in its claws. Willem grasps the offered cup and sips it, ignoring the imp, which immediately resolves itself back into the shadows of the quiet study. Willem sips and sighs and leans back to better see his newest creation, the skeletal damsel primping for her lover.
He decides to pity the Arab. Belrael is no place for one of his mindset. Too focused, too determined. Too sane. No logic can be trusted, no equation relied upon here.
In the very corner of portrait-Amy’s red room, Willem sketches the posts and bottom rung of a ladder. The ladder always seems to find its way into his art, of late. His ladder. Him.
Jakob the liar, descending Jakob’s ladder. Willem adds it into his composition with resignation. Jakob will not be denied. One would do well to heed him, respect him, avoid him.
The dwarf and the fancy robber-baron. They would soon see precisely what that means.
Willem giggles to think of the Arab shaking hands with Jakob and sips ever more of his yellow wine. Welcome to Belrael. Think of it as home.
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