I DON'T BELIEVE IN LIFE
and I won't believe in death until I die
Although Septimus has always been an avid artist, he doesn’t often paint.
It just isn’t convenient. He is a naturalist, and his work always requires him to travel; sketching is comparatively quick, though woefully colorless, leaving him to fill in the blanks that paint would cover with messily handwritten notes that rarely do the radiance of the world around him and the creatures that inhabit it any justice. When he still had his magic, he managed to craft spells to fill in the colors for him, but that always felt cheap. Now, stripped of almost everything that makes him himself, he doesn’t so much as have the option.
He has spent the past several weeks travelling well outside of the dominion of Delumine and only arrived in the court two nights ago; exhaustion still pulled at his limbs, his wings, his eyes, the corner of his lips. Still, he’d awakened at midday, collected his supplies, and marched into the woods to paint. The wanderlust and agitation seemed to grow worse by the week. The time he spent inside walls was agonizing, and travel was less and less a balm to the anxious fidgeting of his soul than a distraction, thinly-veiled at best. Where had his magic gone, and what did he have to do to find it again? Without it, the sharp points of his teeth felt unnatural beneath his lips, the bulk of his antlers felt too-heavy on his skull; he was all the trappings of the fae creature he tried to tell himself he remained, but he had none of the essence. The world was no longer effortless. It was heavy and cold, and he was tired. He had never been tired before he came to Novus, and he had lost count of the thousands of years he had spent wandering.
Feeling weight, he decided, was the worst consequence of mortality. The weight of his antlers, or his wings; the weight of exhaustion; the weight of other people; the weight of being trapped here, unable to escape; the weight of days as they passed him by; the terrifying, looming sensation of getting older. He hated it. He didn’t understand how mortals could tolerate it.
Maybe that weight was what made him set up the easel by the creek in the snow, half-frozen in swirling patches and surrounded by dusted, slumbering oaks. He had always valued the things he saw on his travels, but he had never valued them like this - it had always been with the understanding that he could return to them someday. Now, he simply tried not to think about all the things he might never see again, the way his mind had begun to tick steadily towards some sort of obsession with preservation.
But he doesn’t think about that as he paints. He thinks about the shape of the branches – their lines and contours, the colors he will have to mix to make that specific shade of brown. He thinks about how to shape water with a brush, how to separate it from the glossy clumps of ice, how to texture the snow. He tries to delude himself into imagining that it is something like what he could do when half his blood was good as ichor, when he could still spin life from air and breathe it into motion. It isn’t. The sensation can’t compare. The image can never be touched.
Against the bleak melancholy of the landscape, a swarm of greys and whites and browns so dark that they might as well be black, the sudden appearance of red is almost startling - like a blooming wound on ghost-pale skin.
@Katerina || <3
"Speech!"
and I won't believe in death until I die
Although Septimus has always been an avid artist, he doesn’t often paint.
It just isn’t convenient. He is a naturalist, and his work always requires him to travel; sketching is comparatively quick, though woefully colorless, leaving him to fill in the blanks that paint would cover with messily handwritten notes that rarely do the radiance of the world around him and the creatures that inhabit it any justice. When he still had his magic, he managed to craft spells to fill in the colors for him, but that always felt cheap. Now, stripped of almost everything that makes him himself, he doesn’t so much as have the option.
He has spent the past several weeks travelling well outside of the dominion of Delumine and only arrived in the court two nights ago; exhaustion still pulled at his limbs, his wings, his eyes, the corner of his lips. Still, he’d awakened at midday, collected his supplies, and marched into the woods to paint. The wanderlust and agitation seemed to grow worse by the week. The time he spent inside walls was agonizing, and travel was less and less a balm to the anxious fidgeting of his soul than a distraction, thinly-veiled at best. Where had his magic gone, and what did he have to do to find it again? Without it, the sharp points of his teeth felt unnatural beneath his lips, the bulk of his antlers felt too-heavy on his skull; he was all the trappings of the fae creature he tried to tell himself he remained, but he had none of the essence. The world was no longer effortless. It was heavy and cold, and he was tired. He had never been tired before he came to Novus, and he had lost count of the thousands of years he had spent wandering.
Feeling weight, he decided, was the worst consequence of mortality. The weight of his antlers, or his wings; the weight of exhaustion; the weight of other people; the weight of being trapped here, unable to escape; the weight of days as they passed him by; the terrifying, looming sensation of getting older. He hated it. He didn’t understand how mortals could tolerate it.
Maybe that weight was what made him set up the easel by the creek in the snow, half-frozen in swirling patches and surrounded by dusted, slumbering oaks. He had always valued the things he saw on his travels, but he had never valued them like this - it had always been with the understanding that he could return to them someday. Now, he simply tried not to think about all the things he might never see again, the way his mind had begun to tick steadily towards some sort of obsession with preservation.
But he doesn’t think about that as he paints. He thinks about the shape of the branches – their lines and contours, the colors he will have to mix to make that specific shade of brown. He thinks about how to shape water with a brush, how to separate it from the glossy clumps of ice, how to texture the snow. He tries to delude himself into imagining that it is something like what he could do when half his blood was good as ichor, when he could still spin life from air and breathe it into motion. It isn’t. The sensation can’t compare. The image can never be touched.
Against the bleak melancholy of the landscape, a swarm of greys and whites and browns so dark that they might as well be black, the sudden appearance of red is almost startling - like a blooming wound on ghost-pale skin.
@
"Speech!"
AND RARELY, IF THE WOOD ACCEPTS THE BLADE WITHOUT CONDITIONSthe two pieces keep their balance in spite of the blow❃please tag Septimus! contact is encouraged, short of violence
