[Dor, 777.]
From on high, the overcast sky roils like heartache. Clouds part as a wound and sunlight descends on the scene: Two lovers at on a bench, in a private plaza.
The likeness of the Vallakian minstrel Duval is rendered in marble whites and bold brushtrokes; short of hair, of incipient smile, and parting their lips for what must've been a merry tune. Stuck in time, his rigid fingers forever pull his harp's string taut. A bonneted, wizened woman clung onto his memory; one hand bound by his waist and the other between his pectorals. Her colors are blurry soft. Olive for her attire, a domestic servant's; flush for her skin. Droplets of tears the shade of kohl stain the statue's thighs, the mourner's skirt, and the cobblestones beneath them. Nobody bothers them, all the surrounding windows are closed.
A black dappled moth is signed on the painting's lower left.
| [Regii, 777.]
A blurry backdrop of rainy greys and a foreground of black, it's protagonist figures resist a single form, and they change depending on one's focus or suggestion:
Night. The un-twinkling shrouds of tattered nobility drag behind them; their courts ride lost upon sheerest cliffs. They are only silhouettes: Three-pronged crowns, profile view, beards and braids. They loom. At their feet dance their heirs, incorporeal in malign bacchanal. Night. The thick dales shake blurry, shafts are tall and branches tangled, roots reach wide; they stubbornly straddle the mountain's feet. They are only silhouettes: Bedraggled crowns, brambled almost-faces. They loom. Below, the ruins of oldest wars gently shade the grasses.
Almost invisible, the signature: A dappled-and-horned moth rests on a rotting leaf. | [Armata de Caritate, 778.]
This piece is composed like a historical war painting. However, it's active protagonists aren't conventional warriors, but Halan healers. Where one might expect bascinets and breastplates, there are impersonal long white veils. Ammunitions are bandoliers of medicinal potables. Women, not men, march as a regiment into a scarred field: War's cruel ruins.
The enemy is long gone. Many battered wounded lie on the dirt among smoldering craters. An army of caring ghosts sees them bandaged, sutured, and stabilized. The hopeful needy are carried on stretchers towards humble tents among a villages' husk; surrounded by peeling plaster walls, broken brick, and torn timber. Above, wide skies are choked by smoke-grey cumulus of clouds, accented dusk bronze. Plumes of smoke feed into it from a backdrop of hills, hinting at distant battles. The sun is obscured, yet few precious rays shine on each kindness, like a miracle.
A dappled moth is signed on the lower right, where the ruins are blackest. |