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The narrator opens with a meditation on stories. *Why do we tell them?* Every culture he has ever visited tells them — men trapped alone for years tell them to themselves; ancients leave them painted on the walls of caves; women whisper them to their babies. Stories explain us. The one word that separates a human from an animal, given a hundred thousand to play with, is *stories*. We need them. He apologises for this one. The more you think about it, the more you will realise that the tale he has told today had to end the way it did. Stories demand certain endings. It is part of their nature.

He wishes he could have explained this to Painter, kneeling on the cobbles as the sky turned itself inside-out around him. Because Painter did not understand. He thought the story was not finished.

Painter stands up. He picks up his brush in fingers that ache from the long fight, takes Akane's ink while she cowers in the chaos, and walks — past terrified police, among wounded painters, past townspeople crying out at the strange light pouring down on a city seeing the sun for the first time in seventeen centuries. He reaches the blank wall. The one that had been left for him. The masterpiece he had never finished. As the city panics, he starts painting.

*Horribly inconsiderate of him*, the narrator notes drily. *We were all ready to go home.* But he keeps painting anyway.

A painting is, of course, a story too. Not a still fragment of one, the narrator reminds us, but an entire story. Every painting moves, full of life, if you know how to look at it.

Here he paints a beautiful woman sitting on the branch of a tree, soaring high in the sky, flowers bursting behind her like fireworks. *I know you*, he whispers. The curve of her hair as it spills down her back. The line of her chin. The defiant confidence in her eyes. That smile. *I know you.* He does not have two thousand years of experience. But what he has is, in some ways, better — because art requires intent and art requires passion, and among every painter in Kilahito you would not find one with more of either. He works calmly while the city trembles. The shroud vanishes in large patches, leaving only wisps. He seems to paint from those wisps directly — using the ink of the soul. Her dress, the shade of the sky that day, captured in inkwash greyscale. The blazing sun behind her — a section with no paint at all, picked out by the streaks around it.

Painter finally has a reason for his masterwork. For him, audience had always been so very important — and tonight he has a singular audience. One person. The most important one.

Something touches him on the arm. Unseen, yet warm, sending a thrill of heat through him as he paints the flowers. A patch of dying shroud clings to him; nobody else notices, too busy with the end of the world. Another touch, on the other shoulder. A final flourish — the dots that are her pupils — and he turns to find smoke behind him spinning like a vortex, white on the inside, an infinite hole, the eye of a nightmare in reverse. Within it a dark shape reaches toward him. Painter drops the brush and reaches in. And takes her hand.

*I…*, her voice says. *It's not right…*

*Yumi*, he says, tears in his eyes, holding on tight. *We decide what is right. Nightmares can be real. Why not dreams? You have power granted by the spirits. Your whole life — your dozens of lives — you've used it to serve. Use it for yourself this once.*

*But…*

*Our world, Yumi. Our rules.*

*I don't…*

*Our world. Our rules.*

*Our… world.*

*You deserve to live.*

*Our rules.*

*You deserve to be happy.*

*I… deserve to choose.* Her other hand emerges from the smoke and seizes his. *I deserve love.*

They hold to each other as the city trembles, as the smoke dies, as the world changes. Light from above rains down and shines on her face. The last wisps of the shroud vanish. And at the end of it all, when someone finally thinks to check on him, they find Painter huddled against the wall beneath a painting of incredible caliber, holding a young woman tight in his arms. As real as anyone else. Because she wanted to be.