Chapter 135: What goes around
[ Skarthheim Territories : Autumn’s chamber. We continue from the next morning... when Vera was supposed to be introduced to her new master ( mistress to be exact) ]
The door creaked open.
Vera stepped inside the chamber hesitantly.Something about the place was already giving her the chills. The scent of iron...the incense and the scent of damn paint hung in the air...strange, intoxicating, and disorienting as well.
Her eyes adjusted slowly to the flickering lanterns lining the walls, but her head remained bowed low, as instructed.
Ahead of her, seated in eerie stillness, was a young woman.
She was painting.
Her back was turned, draped in layers of sheer dark silk. Her long sleeves dragged gently across the floor as she moved her brush across a canvas that looked far too... organic. The surface wasn’t cloth or paper...it was hide. Someone or something’s skin. And the pigment she painted with...
Vera’s eyes widened.It was blood.
Still, the image being created was beautiful...a hauntingly vivid sunset, where crimson streaked the sky over a beautiful lake,and a forest was somewhere nearby. The settling looked very familiar.It felt like home.. The Great Lakes? Probably not. Folks from the Old world didn’t visit the New until it was doomsday... they hadn’t visited in decades... This woman looked far too young to have travelled to the New Lands prior to the last massacre.
So not the Great Lakes, Vera concluded... Perhaps it was a similar place.
For a moment, Vera forgot everything...her ache, her fear, the weight of chains that still felt like ghosts on her wrists.An artist... a painter... How cruel can they really be? The rumors were probably just that... rumors.