One
POV: painter
Summary
Painter begins his night shift outside his apartment building in Kilahito by losing a staring contest with the star — the lone point of light in an otherwise unbroken black sky, which he has always found strangely companionable on the long nights when the only other thing keeping him company is the hion above. The narrator pauses on the city itself: a circular town lit by twin glowing cords of energy, one a cool teal-aqua and one a bright pink-magenta, that hang unsupported above every street and split into wire-thin filaments that power every building. He notes, almost in passing, that this is roughly where Virtuosity Splintered herself, and suspects that is why the star's light still cuts through the shroud.
Painter himself is introduced by way of a quiet aside: born Nikaro and not yet twenty, he goes almost exclusively by his title, having internalised the nightmare-painter tradition more thoroughly than most. He is lanky, dressed in an untucked grey-blue shirt and a long coat, with shoulder-length hair he believes is impressive and isn't. He is — by the deliberately modern flattery his society pays its essential workers — important. He is also paid almost nothing, lives in a one-room apartment provided by his employer, and walks his beat each night without fear of muggers; Kilahito is a safe city because the nightmares outside have rendered ordinary street crime redundant.
He walks toward the western edge of the city through silent streets. The only sign of life is Rabble Way, a low-end merchant district where shopkeepers have bent and curved hion into signs above their doors, two-colour designs traced in continuous lines like aqueous neon. Past that, Painter reaches the perimeter: the city ends in a final ring of windowless warehouse buildings, a soft boundary rather than a wall, with one last empty street running around the outside. Beyond that is the shroud itself — an endless, churning, ink-like dark that besieges the city and the whole planet, smothering it like a dome and held back only by the hion. The surface flows and churns the way thick oil might, and reflects nothing. Only the star's light cuts through it from above.
Painter folds his arms at the edge of his domain and tries to feel like the lone hunter of the dark — the solitary wanderer, prowling the endless night unafraid. He is interrupted almost at once by laughter to his right. Akane, in a green skirt and white blouse, is strolling the perimeter with Tojin, a flat-featured young man with arms Painter thinks are out of proportion to the rest of him. They notice him standing there. Akane calls out, asking if he is on the same schedule again; he stammers something about the chart and isn't even sure he filled it out. She smiles, says "see you later, maybe?" and walks on, heels clipping the stone, paintbrush and canvas in hand. Tojin gives him a small shrug and follows.
Painter watches them go and pushes down the urge to chase after them. He reminds himself, with increasing strain, that he is a solitary wanderer, a lone hunter — that he doesn't want to walk his beat in a group the way many of the others do. It would be nice, he thinks, if someone would ask anyway, so that he could turn them down with stoic firmness. Then he could prove, to himself and to Akane, that he had friends. As her laughter carries two streets over he finds it harder than usual to keep up the brooding posture. Most of his colleagues do not, in fact, treat nightmare painting as the solemn calling he makes it out to be. He needs to. It helps him feel less like a mistake, especially when he tries not to picture the next six decades of his life as nothing but this street, alone, backlit by hion.