Much as I appreciate the gift of the Muse of painting I would have liked the time to manifest my own talents as a painter I realize there is some urgency to the trade deal with the family of Thank you  for the Muse of Painting.  I am working on developing my native talent when I have spare time, but she still continues to be my main focus and guide in my artistic endeavors.  While I miss you dearly, I am hopeful that I will return home only long enough to collect my things.


    They filed into the still life room and Vaterin peered curiously at Marble’s canvas.  Lately, she had been preoccupied with painting her, rather than what she had been painting.  It was with an unpleasant shock that she saw the skillful rendering of the objects before them, including a statue brought in as a modest alternative to one of the Brothers or Sisters.  She said she wasn’t good at figure painting!  But look at it!  Well, honestly, I can’t tell either way, but… Vaterin flicked open her penknife, and rapidly—but sincerely!  I am faithful!  Truly I am!—ran through her prayer of invocation.


    “Father Supreme, bless this invocation of your Muse of Painting.  Holy muse, gift of the Holy Spirit, please come upon me.  Let the One God shine through the work I achieve through His angel.  In the name of the Christ Savior, amen.”


    Oh my G—oh sarx, it is better than what I’ve been doing!  But I’ve spent hours at my canvas!  I have a literal, Church-bargained angel to inspire me and she’s better than I am!  Whatever her issue is with figure painting, it’s not the perspective, it’s not the lighting and shadow!


    Am I not faithful enough?  I attend two services a day, I go down into the catacombs to meditate upon the divine that I might find silence in the dull roar of the sea.  I believe that the One God sent His angel down to me to help me represent His creation in a creative and pleasing way, and yet all I can draw!  Vaterin looked at her canvas, which had on it only the statue itself, rendered not unpleasantly, she would admit, but Marble’s painting!


    Calm down.  Think about this rationally.  You’ve been painting Marble painting at night, and during your free time.  That painting, surely, is superior to what Marble has wrought here.  “But is it better than what she is painting?” came the unbidden thought.


    Vaterin stood there slackly, staring at the painting Marble had been doing under Brother Pitch’s tutelage, until Marble herself came in and saw that Vaterin was not attending to her own canvas.  Vaterin jumped at Marble’s hand on her arm.  “Is something the matter?”


    “How are you… how are you better than me?”


    “What?”


    “You don’t see it?  How can you not see it?  I see it, or rather the Muse of Painting sees it and renders it to my eyes.  Your grasp of form and shape, your understanding of perspective, even your use of lighting and color!  You said you can’t paint figures but you’re painting this sculpture and you’re painting the Virtue at night and what else have you been painting during our free hours that’s better than anything I can produce?!  I literally have divine inspiration and you do art which is better than mine!”


    Marble drew back, holding her hand as though Vaterin’s arm had been a bed of hot coals.  “What are you talking about?”  Oh no.  Now I’ve gone and upset her.  Brother Pitch will put me on punishment detail and I’ll be copying scripture instead of trying to improve my art… but can I improve my art?  My own painting, my skill with it, even supplemented by that book Marble found, is pathetic and paltry next to that of my angel, and an angel is unchanging.  Every angel makes a single choice in the time of its infinity and so why am I…!  Why am I here.  I should have stayed with my family and learned to care for ciphering and the guildswoman my parents chose for me to wed.  Marble is wroth with me for some reas—“Vaterin?  Vaterin!”  How long has she been trying to get my attention?


    Her voice, when she spoke, came out froggy and choked, “Yes?”


    “What are you talking about?  What are you so upset about?  You draw different things than me.  Are you upset you can’t draw landscapes?  Did not the One God give every person different talents, different ways to honor Him?”


    “But… the statue.  The Virtue.”


    “What about them?”


    “You paint them better than I can.”


    “Vaterin Lime, you are being ridiculous.  When I paint a statue, the work you do painting figures has already been done for me.  They’ve brought out the virtues, the beauty or ugliness or whatever they’re trying to portray.  I can paint the view off the edge of a cliff, but I cannot take a person sitting in a chair and portray what makes them noble, incisive, wise, or kind.  And you are such a—!”  She cut herself off and sat down at her canvas, making short, irritated strokes on her canvas.  No.  Please no, don’t spoil your still life on account of me.


    “Marble—”


    “Vaterin, mind your own canvas.”  Brother Pitch sounded particularly choleric.  Marble didn’t even look over to intervene.


    Her angel was already summoned, but in her disquiet Vaterin felt the summons slipping from her fingertips.  I can’t even maintain the faith necessary to commune with my Muse.  That’s something I never struggled with before, something that came naturally.  Oh, wrack and ruin what am I going to do?  I never meant to upset Marble like this, it was just such a shock.  She might not even accept—she never said she’d accept patronage by a mere merchant family.  Besides.  If I go back, it’s to be married to secure my parents’ dynasty.  I can’t even offer that.  But how am I supposed to paint when a literal angel—Vaterin felt bereft, the canvas before her flat and gray, and realized that her angel was no longer in harmony with her, that her doubt had unseated it from its place in her mind.  That’s it then.  I may as well pack it in.  I can’t paint at all without my angel.  “Vaterin Lime!  Pick up your brush!” Brother Pitch called.  Half-heartedly, unwilling or unable to get out her penknife, Vaterin picked up her brush and palette.  The first thing she did was accidentally put her thumb in the orange paint.  The next was to upend the palette onto herself as she tried to brush the paint off on her smock.  Some of it even got on the clothes under the smock.  Well done, Vaterin.


    She finally got her palette arranged—though, of course, I’ll have to unseat things if I can calm down enough to try and conjure my Muse again—and her brush in hand and dabbed at her canvas.  I don’t even have my angel, I may as well draw the clay fruit and the fern around the blasted statue.  She picked some green and dabbed at the canvas.  It’s the wrong shade.  She laid some brown next to it, and blended the two colors.  Well.  That’s not actually any worse than I could do with my angel.  I wonder if my parents accidentally paid for a Muse of Portraiture.  Or maybe Marble is right that every soul interacts differently with the Divine.


    Time passed slowly and painfully for Vaterin, several hours of practice with Brother Pitch providing commentary in his biting tone.  Even Slate was spared the worst of his vitriol, however, in favor of the travesty against art that Vaterin was contriving to paint.  “Saints and Powers, Lime!  You’re supposed to be the angel channeler, what happened?  Lose your knife?”  Vaterin hung her head and shook it from side to side.  “Then summon it and stop wasting time with the fern, we all know you can’t paint scenery!”  Such a great teacher.  Maybe I should have picked a different school.  It just seemed so perfect.  Hundreds of miles from home, months-long semesters, a focus on the divine… and Marble.  Marble is here, and if I hadn’t come I never would have met her.  Which may be the greater torment, to have met her.  The woman my parents want me to marry will never choose a book on art to teach me terms for the shadows cast by foliage in the wind.  Still, Brother Pitch is a sarxhead.This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.


    Beleaguered, sworn to obedience so long as she attended, Vaterin pricked her thumb and murmured her prayer, trying not to notice the looks and whispers as she did so.  The latter, at least, were silenced with a sharp look around the room by Brother Pitch.  “Please, One God.  Let this work.”  It was only in that moment, when she muttered a prayer of sincere supplication and not merely of shamed obedience, that she felt the Muse of Painting settle upon her eyes, her mind, her hands.  Ask of the Father Supreme and you shall receive, provided you ask as a child asks their Father.  Warmed by the prospect of not packing her bags just yet, Vaterin put the future out of her mind, even so near a future as Marble’s silent distance after class, and painted the statue before her.  And, when Brother Pitch was safely on the other side of the classroom, dabbed a little paint on her little portrait of a fern.


    “Marble!  I need to talk to you!”


    “Are you going to be an idiot?”


    “Probably.”  Vaterin bobbed her head.  “I am very much an idiot.  …what manner of idiocy am I guilty of, at this time?”


    “You don’t even get what you did?”


    “I… realized you’re a better artist than me?  I had a crisis of faith in front of the entire student body?  I drew Brother Pitch’s fire away from Slate?”


    “Sarx!  You’re still doing it!  Stop it!  Stop it right now!”


    Vaterin was taken aback at such strong language and tone, though it was entirely in keeping with the Virtue of the Jester and the Power of Simon, the Power of Self-Expression.  “I don’t know what I’m stopping.” There was a long and pregnant pause.  “Will you tell me what I’m stopping?”


    Marble let out a frustrated breath.  “I would rather not have this conversation in the halls where all and sundry can see, but seeing as you are a complete and utter nincompoop, and that you already made a scene in the study hall, I suppose it’s academic.”  She took a deep, slow breath, centering the way Vaterin did in preparation to conjure her angel, from the look of it.  Finally, after several such breaths, she spoke.  “Why is it a contest?”


    “What?”


    “No, that’s my line, when you made it into one.  Your line is explaining why, when we are friends and maybe something else if you can just remove your dumb blonde head from your behind for a minute, you made painting into a contest!”  What?


    “It’s not a contest.  I mean, we’re competing for patronage, but we’re hoping to lowball and get patronized by the same noble.”


    “That.  Is.  Exactly.  It.  And yet, in front of everyone, you babbled forth lines of agony over my painting being better than yours.”


    “But it is.”


    “Vaterin!  It’s not!  It’s different!  I tried to explain this to you and you don’t—!  Here!  Look!  Look at these, if that’s what will make you happy!”  What would make me happy would be to not have you be angry at me.  I think I want that even more than I want to be an artist.  Marble thrust a folio of pages into Vaterin’s hands.  “Look at them!  Those are my attempts at figure drawing!  At drawing horses, humans both adult and child, cows, even chickens!  Look and see that you are capable of capturing a beauty I simply cannot and then let go of it!  So you can’t draw backgrounds!  I can’t draw people!  Write can’t draw in color and Felspar can’t draw at all, he has to work clay.  We are all different, beautiful people put on this Orth to portray Creation in our own different, beautiful way.”  Marble’s eyes shone with tears, and Vaterin was certain she could feel her heart breaking.


    “I’m sorry.”


    “Do you even know what you’re apologizing for?”  Think fast, Vaterin.  If she cries, and you can’t come up with the right words, things will not ever be the same between the two of you.


    “I’m sorry… that I compared our still lives.  Wait, wait, I know that’s not it exactly!” Vaterin put up a forebearing, desperate hand.  “I… should be focused on what I can create, without regard for what you can create… sarx, I could use a Muse of Apologies right now.”


    “You shouldn’t need an angel to apologize.”  Marble crossed her arms over her chest.  But at least she’s not crying or storming off.  Yet.


    “‘Do not quibble over words, for it only ruins those who listen to it’?”


    Marble raised a single bushy eyebrow.  “What?”


    “It was the only thing I could think to say.  It’s scripture.”


    “I know it’s scripture, I want to know what it has to do with your apology.”


    “Your art is your art.  And my art is my art.  And except as pertains to trying to get the same patron, they’re… they’re apples and oranges.  There is no basis for comparison, nor is there any reason to compare.  And I did that.  And I’m sorry.”  Vaterin screwed up one side of her face in a wince.  “The words aren’t great, but did I get it right?”  Oh blooming blasted heaths she’s crying now.


    Moments stretched on, Vaterin unable to determine if she should put her arms around Marble, until she couldn’t stand it and reached out.  When she did, Marble folded against her, and began to laugh even as her tears wet Vaterin’s smock.  “You’re an idiot.”


    “I am absolutely an idiot.  But I have the occasional good idea.”


    “Oh?  What good idea did you have that came out of this?”


    “What if we collaborated on a picture?  Showed the world what we can do together, and sold it at the expo?”  Please let that be the right gesture.


    “I don’t know that they’d allow that, and you’d be painting a figure over a finished background—”


    “Oh, so you’d go first?”


    “I’m a noblewoman.  Of course I go first.”


    “I’m an idiot!  I see a Queen and forget to bow!”


    Marble adopted a mocking tone, and Vaterin knew things would be alright.  “Which is greater, legitimate station or the village fool?!”


    “I’m pretty sure neither of us are honoring the Savior calling me a fool.  Or an idiot.”


    “Nor a numbskull, nor a buffoon, nor a blowharding troglodyte.”


    “You didn’t include those when you were berating me.”


    “I’ll have to remember them for the next time you’re an idiot.”


    “You’ll put up with a next time?”


    “‘How many times shall I forgive you?  Three times?  Three times three times?  Three to the power of three times?’  I can quote scripture too.”


    “There’s a Power of Threes?”


    “It’s an algebra thing.”  Eugh.  More ciphering.


    “And how many times is that?”


    “Twenty-seven.  But it’s a metaphor, not a rule.”


    Vaterin’s eyes crinkled at the edges and she nuzzled her nose against Marble’s.  “Thank you.  I’ll try not to test the rule or the metaphor.”


    “Dork.”


    “If I’m a dork who gets to kiss you, I’ll be a dork every day of the week.  Except Sunday.  That’s the Sabbath and being this much of a dork is hard work.”


    Marble laughed and pressed her lips to Vaterin’s.  Writing Slate whooped in the background of Vaterin’s awareness.