POV: painter
Summary
The narrator opens with the surviving accounts of the nightmares' first appearance on Painter's world — fragmentary, feverish recollections some seventeen centuries old of an event that fell from the sky and shattered the civilisation that had come before. Three are quoted in framing: a poet who afterward refused to speak or write for thirty years; a granddaughter writing of survivors who clung to strangers as brothers; and a single painted plea found in a cave with no body to go with it. By Painter's day, the blackness of the shroud is simply normal. What rebuilt society was the hion — and what holds it together against the dark, more or less, is the corps of nightmare painters.
Painter turns in his canvases at the small foreman's office. Foreman Sukishi, a man whose glare has aged into something properly potent, slides the top canvas out of Painter's bag, sees bamboo, slides out the second canvas, sees bamboo again, and tells him plainly that it is lazy work — that the technique only works properly if the painted shape matches what the nightmare already resembles. Painter insists bamboo works, takes his wages, and walks out.
He drifts to the Noodle Pupil, a corner restaurant outlined in twin hion lines and topped with a glowing bowl-of-noodles sign in teal and magenta. Fifteen of his classmates are already inside; Akane is at her usual back booth, Tojin is kneeling beside another table to adjudicate a noodle-eating contest. Painter hangs his bag on the coatrack without looking, finds a spot at the bar by himself — a lone hunter needs his noodles, he tells himself — and orders his usual from Design, the shop's white-haired manager. The narrator interjects, fondly, to explain that Design is, in fact, a Cryptic from elsewhere in the Cosmere wearing a Lightweaving disguise he himself helped design: a deliberately striking humanoid wireframe with force-projection scaffolding rather than flesh underneath, requested by her in those terms because the more striking the figure, the more disturbing if it ever unravelled. She runs the place. The narrator owns a share.
Design does not act particularly human. She offers Painter a discount in prime-number percentages — she has standards — and answers his halting attempt to ask whether what he does is important by telling him a one-line story about a place that had no nightmare painters and got eaten, and then by offering him seven percent off. Halfway through his meal, Akane steps to the bar to collect festive drinks for her booth; Painter looks away and she is gone again before he can speak. When he is finished, Design quietly suggests he go talk to them — people grow up, she says, which is one of the things that makes them different from rocks — and he denies it, declares himself a loner, and asks for the bill instead. She charges him ten kon — a ninety-seven percent discount — because, she says, he needs it, and threatens to go tell Akane and Tojin herself that he is lonely if he won't. He grabs his bag from the coatrack and flees.
The coatrack, the narrator informs us in an aside, is in fact him. He was fully aware of his surroundings when his ailment first struck and froze him in place, and watched Design spray-paint him copper and add a crown of hat-pegs and bandoliers of hooks to make him useful. He had screamed internally. He has it on good authority, he adds, that he makes an excellent coatrack — and prefers to think of it as a particularly committed disguise rather than the indignity of having been propped up in the corner of his own restaurant.
Outside the Noodle Pupil the night is wet, the streetlights and their hion reflections ghosted in puddles. Painter breathes in and out and finds the brooding-loner pose increasingly difficult to hold. Without it, he admits to himself, he is just one of thousands of unremarkable young men without the courage to do anything notable and without the skill to fail notably — unfair, but unshakeable, and frightening enough that he wants to go home and put the pose back on by watching the opening of his favourite drama on the hion viewer. At the first intersection he sees the tell: black wisps curling off a corner brick. A fresh nightmare has come through, recently enough that the trail is still steaming. He is off shift; another painter will find it. Hands in pockets, he walks on past the corner. Two minutes later he reappears, steps through a puddle, and starts after it instead, muttering that the first part of the drama is always a recap anyway.