“Absolutely,” he admitted without hesitation. “Haven’t you noticed? In the name of so-called stability, they stripped us of the one thing that made us human—art. And for what? To keep us safe from ourselves?”
Evelyne paused. She had no answer. It was what simply was. The order she had been raised to accept without question. She had never asked why. But lately she had been questioning too much, and it was changing the shape of her silence.
Alaric went on, eyes bright, voice low enough not to draw attention but quick with frustration.
“Art is the first universal language. It bridges everything—culture, class, even belief. We could come from entirely different worlds, but we might both stand before the same piece and feel the same thing. Grief. Longing. Wonder. It’s endured every empire, every collapse.”
Evelyne tilted her head, studying him. “Are you an artist?”
He huffed a laugh, one corner of his mouth curling. “No. I can’t draw a straight line to save my life. I tried once. It was a horse. Cedric said it looked like a haunted pear.”
That earned a flicker of something from her—amusement, or maybe disbelief.
“But I can appreciate it,” he added. “I admire people who can give form to what most of us don’t have words for. What annoys me isn’t just the rules. I don’t like it, but fine. But this?” He gestured vaguely. “This is erasure. And it’s not right.”
He paused then, eyes narrowing slightly—as if replaying something in his mind, memorizing the shape of a memory no one else could see. His voice, when it came again, was quieter. Steadier.
“It’s never right.”
Evelyne stared at him, caught off guard by the sharpness of it. The conviction. The grief folded inside the words, subtle but unmistakable. She’d known him to be bold, brash even—but this was something else. Something harder to name.
She looked at his profile, at the stubborn line of his jaw, the way his hand rested against his chin like he wasn’t aware he’d clenched it. Her pulse skipped once, unexpected.
Oh.
There it was. The breathlessness of being wrong about someone.
His gaze returned to her. “What do you see, Evelyne?”
“I already said—”
“No.” His voice was softer now, but insistent. “Not what’s painted. Whatyouare seeing.”
Her eyes darted to him, startled, before sliding back to the painting.
What I see.
Not what the doctrine permitted, not the careful phrases drilled into her spine since girlhood.
For a moment, she considered deflecting—offering something neat and correct, the kind of polished answer that cost nothing. But the question had already loosened something she wasn’t ready to lock away again.
She drew a breath, made herself see, truly see, until the paint blurred into emotion.
“A man who is half gone,” she whispered at last. “Her absence drained the color from him. See his palm, turned upward… it’s the gesture of someone who remembers touch and aches without it.”
She leaned in slightly, gaze fixed. “He painted her shadow beside him. His muse was always elusive. The faces were blurred. Sometimes it felt like fog. Sometimes it was only motion, where a person should have been.”
A pause followed, longer this time.
“When he painted himself, he always faced her. His back turned to us, as if she was the only thing that mattered.”
When she glanced up, Alaric was already watching her, his expression unreadable and entirely focused.
“Edrathen was once famous for its painters,” he observed quietly. “The most beautiful frescoes and portraits on the continent. I read that the art back then felt alive.”
She nodded—too quickly—and then slower, as if the second movement might erase the first. But her chest gave her away. Something restless had curled up beneath her sternum and refused to be ignored.
Because he was right.
