TWO HUNDRED SIX: Herdcreatures IV
206
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Standing on a beach as the tide came in, but so much darker than that. The roiling substance that was not water, that was not substance, the threat—it pulled the sand from beneath your feet, pressed against you, promised that you would learn you were only a more stubborn grain. The erosion would eventually take you, too.
The artist had painted that.
And shadows. Lifeforms that had been stubborn in their own ways were now broken, the chaos bleeding from the fractures between what should have, could have been and what was and was changing.
Alden’s body gasped for him, and finally, he could see the picture clearly, though there was a thin quality to it. Like if he looked too hard he’d pop it, and the experience of chaos that hid beneath its surface would pour over him once more.
What he saw was a barren, red place. A desert, with a hill in the distance in the form of a single burgundy roll crossing the width of the painting.
The shards of slick, translucent gray material that seemed to dig into the paint in some places and float above it in others were demons. They hadn’t been given any features, but Alden somehow knew it. Whether they were a symbolic or realistic representation of what had been in the place didn’t matter to him. What mattered as his eyes focused on the center of the painting was the knight who stood there beside a single, stalky plant.
It was taller than the man was, but it was only brown sticks. It should have looked dead to Alden. It didn’t.