“Eight years,” he sighed as he lay in his old bed, which Niko had so graciously lent to him after he’d come back. “I waited for five years only to be told to wait for another eight. Who does that?”
Part of him wanted to say fuck it and just leave, but he knew he couldn’t abandon his own child like that. Son, he corrected himself; Elthena seemed to be pretty certain she was going to have a son. She must have seen that in her vision.
It was a sleepless night for him and a heartbreaking one, too. He considered getting drunk again but decided that was an unhealthy coping mechanism. So, instead, he tried to figure out what it was he was supposed to do with another decade.
He didn’t figure it out, though, not that night or in the day that followed. It wasn’t for almost a week, when he was helping one of the older fishermen recaulk the seams in his boat, that he decided what the right answer was. If he was going to end up being a teacher, then he was going to teach people. It wasn’t like he had a skill for that, but Simon was sure that he was in no way naturally talented at it, either.
He spent a few weeks trying to teach a couple of the other boys and girls of the narrows how to write their names and learn the most basic letters, but they showed no more interest in the subject than Niko had. “I told you,” his former apprentice laughed. “That stuff’s a waste of time!”
“You learned, eventually,” Simon countered.
“Yeah, but only because you made me,” Niko laughed. “And what do I do with it? The math tricks you taught me can be helpful, but the letters? What is it I'm supposed to read?” Tʜe sourcᴇ of thɪs content ɪs Nov3lFɪre.ɴet
That was a good point. Other than Simon’s own journal, he didn’t really have anything for these kids to read. He didn’t have any adventure books or horror stories to share with them. So, it was like teaching them to use a computer without offering them the video games that would keep them playing and learning.
Simon thought about it for days but had no good answer. The proper thing to do would be to kick off an industrial revolution and create movable type and printing presses, but that would take forever and require a lot more money than he had at his disposal.
That was fun, and a couple of them showed some promise, too, but eventually, he decided that this was probably a dead end. Much to Niko’s disappointment, he started taking longer and longer trips abroad once more.
His journey started out simple and almost aimless. He went north along the coast, stopping in villages along the way every night, where he would trade stories and a little labor for a place to sleep and a simple seafood meal. Sometimes, he would help the local blacksmith or herbalist, and other times, we would just contribute menial labor, hanging fish on drying racks or scrubbing barnacles off the bottom of beached boats.
None of it was particularly hard work, and along the way, he would gather certain minerals and broken shells for the next part of his plan, which was slowly taking shape in his mind. He’d been given another eight years, which felt like a prison sentence inside the large prison sentence that the Pit already was. During that time, he probably shouldn’t fight monsters if he could avoid it because dying would complicate things.
That part might have been easy enough, but in that time, he also had to become an excellent teacher for his son and attract enough notice and renown that it would make sense for the queen to hire him without her court raising any eyebrows and being the highly admired blacksmith of Olven’s Narrows was hardly going to cut it.
“That’s more her problem than mine,” he told himself, but really, his pride wouldn’t allow that answer to stick.
He’d gotten famous several times as a monster hunter and more than once as a healer, but beyond that, well, he felt like there was more he could do. So, this time, he tried art.
For the last few years, he’d been drawing and painting, but he’d preserved very little of his work. It had all been scribbled on his walls or scratched into the sand, and the next day they were gone. Now, though, he'd decided to think bigger.
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Simon didn’t have much experience painting, no matter what Niko said, but he did have a lot of experience drawing on walls, so he decided to try his hand at making a fresco. The first one he did was in a moderately sized town just south of the larger city of Thebian. He didn’t even have all of the colors for that project. Because of the geology of that area, Black, red, brown, and yellow were pretty common in the form of various clays. Blue, green, and purple, though, were basically nonexistent. There were blue dyes for clothing, and he’d seen some green pottery glazes in some cities that probably had something to do with copper, but that was pretty much it. 𝔯ά₦ꝊВÈṥ
His first project was simple enough, anyway. After spending a morning slicing and dicing some of the large fish that a man had caught the night before, Simon casually mentioned how much better the fishmarket would look with a little decoration. The red-tiled plaza and the colorful awnings were picturesque, but the plain white stuccoed building that the fish were sold from, along with the plain wooden stalls in front of it, looked almost out of place.
Mercuto was taken with the idea almost immediately, but then Simon suspected he would be. He was a proud man with a large enough operation that several men worked for him, but it was well below where he saw himself in life. As far as he was concerned, he should be running his town, or maybe Thebian or Ionaia itself, and proud men were generally pretty easy to lead around by the nose.
That night, Simon used some of his precious paper to sketch an image of the big man proudly holding an impossibly large grouper, and just like that, Mercuto was sold on the idea. The man was only willing to pay a pittance, of course, but Simon didn’t need more than that. His ingredients involved grinding bones and shells, along with trips to the mountains for coal and clay. His mediums were limited. He could use eggs to make tempura like paints, or he could use clays to bind together something closer to pastel sticks with a binder and a little pressure. Still, all that took was time, and that was the one currency that Simon was rich in.
He spent weeks in preparation, gathering everything and laying out the images, but once he got started, it was done in less than forty-eight hours. Well, not everything was done. He’d still have to mix paint to redo the stands in red to make them more eye-catching, but the wall art was completed in record time. Once he started, he just couldn’t stop. In fact, pausing to mix another batch of black or ocher so he could keep going was the most annoying part. Though he’d never really needed an apprentice while he was a blacksmith, he would have loved one just now.
Sadly, he was a nobody without a lucrative career to offer to a young man. He was just a homeless guy who liked to draw and had some time to kill. So, he’d have to do it himself.
Though Simon was not completely happy with the final result, his employer was thrilled and paid him more than the agreed-upon amount. He offered to let Simon paint his boat next, but Simon knew just enough about paints to know that nothing he created would last long in the sea. He was trying to create art that people would notice, and in that, at least, he succeeded. Before the week was out, Simon had offers from three other merchants seeking similar treatment. Two just wanted the extra vivid reds and yellows he’d worked out how to create, but in the end, it was the third one he went with.
The local cooper had heard the news that the queen’s virtue and chastity had stopped Mount Karkosia from erupting, and though he’d long since established a meager shrine on the side of his shop, he wanted to make it grander and more noticeable. Though the cooper was much less well off than Simon’s previous client, he paid nearly as much, but truthfully, that was one project that Simon probably would have done for free.
His first job had been a test of techniques and materials more than anything, but this one, he vowed, would be a work of art worthy of Elthena, even though he doubted that she would ever see it. Simon planned all of it carefully. He built scaffolding, fetched more materials than he thought he would use, and patched the building's stucco before he began to ensure that what he made would last for a long time. This time, it took nearly a month to get everything ready, but it was worth the wait.
Simon’s painting had attracted attention last time, even though it had been done after market hours so as not to harm the fishmonger’s business. This time, though, he painted throughout the day, and often many of the passersby would stop to watch. He’d never thought of painting as entertainment, but at least while he did this project, it brought new meaning to watching paint dry.
He did the background of the work in deep reds, oranges, and browns, which were among the best colors he had access to. In the foreground, though, he painted Elthena only in black and white, creating as stark a contrast as possible. For her pose, he chose a beatific expression of prayer, and though he didn’t know for a fact that he was probably ripping off some classic pose involving the Virgin Mary, he suspected that was the case. On earth, he hadn’t been remotely religious, but he recalled that his mother had, and there were more than a few of those sorts of icons scattered throughout the house.
The background was vivid, though because of how inspired he was by the fiery mountain, it took only two days, which was nothing, given its size. It did a good job of depicting Ionar as only he had seen it that night. The queen, though, he agonized on for over a week, and he still wasn’t completely happy about it.
Everyone thought he’d done an amazing job, but then, they’d never seen the queen before. He had, though, more than most, so there was no excuse for his imperfection.
In the end, there wasn’t a single feature he could point to that was the problem, though. Her eyes were just as kind as the real woman’s, and even though her mouth was almost eight feet wide in his fresco, it was every bit as full and kissable as Elthena’s actually was. There was nothing wrong with it, but to him, it just lacked that spark.
No one agreed with him. Not the cooper who was ecstatic about the whole thing, nor the townspeople who began to pray there much more often as a result, nor even the rich nobility who traveled from Thebian and even further away to see what rumors were calling a masterpiece.