POV: painter
Summary
Painter gets to his feet in a small wooden room with no furniture, his eyes flinching against the impossible red-orange light pouring through the single window — a colour, he thinks, that light should never be, like seeing blood spilled in the wrong shade. Beside him on the floor a young woman in the same bright nightdress is grabbing at a blanket; her hands go straight through it. He runs through what he was taught about dreams in classes he mostly used as cover for sketching, and lands on the trick of reading: you usually can't, in a dream. He finds a small book on a shelf, pages through prayers, can read them perfectly. Time is linear. Causality holds. He is not dreaming. Somehow this is real.
The girl, frantic, calls for attendants and gets no answer. He briefly wonders whether she is some new species of nightmare — a stable one so far beyond stable that it has gained colour and the shape of a person — and discards the idea. She is not maddened, not lashing out. Whatever this is, it is not his kind of dark.
She turns to him with a different fear. *You wear my clothing… You're the spirit I talked to last night. You've taken shape.* It is the wrong explanation but it solves his more immediate problem of being screamed at, and he closes the book and folds his arms in what he thinks is a convincingly cool warrior pose. She bows her head, apologises for her earlier attitude to the powerful spirit, and tells him in answer to his *where am I?* that he is in the wagon of a yoki-hijo called Yumi. He asks where the furniture is, and she answers that she needs none, as her sole purpose is to serve and to contemplate his greatness. He decides *cool* has a ceiling.
He braves the window. The sky outside is washed-out blue; a single enormous ball of red-orange light dominates it. Plants drift overhead in clusters, tended by great crows and what look like flying objects herding the crows. Brown stone runs out to the horizon dusted with hovering flowers. He notices, eventually, that the wagon itself is floating. On the horizon he sees a gleam he recognises — *the star* — and pieces enough of it together to ask whether her star, the daystar, is in fact a place people live; if a nightmare from the sky took him here, the small bright point in her sky might be his home. Yumi, not following any of it, asks the powerful spirit to please explain his will so she might know how to properly worship it.
A knock interrupts him before he can climb out of the spirit costume. Chaeyung and Hwanji enter with a low floor-table and a bowl of rice; they walk straight through the panicking Yumi without seeing her, kneel in front of Painter, and address him as *Chosen*. Yumi gasps the obvious. The spirit has taken her shape — to everyone else in the wagon, Painter is her. *Had he?* He is not, in fact, a spirit. He has no idea what is happening. He is, however, hungry, and the women appear to be waiting for him to eat. So he settles at the table, takes the bowl from one of them, picks up a pair of maipon sticks from the other, and starts eating. The attendants gasp. He asks if there is anything to go with it.
Yumi watches in horror as her attendants flee, leaving the door swinging open onto more of the unbearable light. Then something in her expression hardens — drooping lips drawn taut, teeth clenched, every muscle ready. *That's it,* she says. *I'm done.*