The Gifts of Mortality

Chapter 5, part two

"Samil."

"This is just temporary, by the way. It'll fix itself when we depart from here." When he gestures to indicate the "this" he is talking about, he waves his hands at her instead of down at himself.

Rachel's head drops to regard herself and she sees she looks like Samil. The coloring on her skin and clothes is off just enough to appear uncanny. Her skin is much paler than usual, sapped of her golden brown color. It is also without blemish or flaw and has a smoothness that could only come from a painter's brush. Her gray suit is also too flawless for reality and the color is slightly different from how she remembers it. The same can be said of the blue button-down shirt she wears beneath it, and because blue doesn't fit the painting's color scheme, her shirt is now a dull gray.

"I'll be back to normal when we get out of here?" she asks the god, who has the same strange air-brushed look about him.

"Yes, I promise you that much and I'm, again, so sorry about the trip—"

"It's fine. Let's move on."

He eyes her and nods, beginning to chew on the inside of his cheek.

"What does this painting show?" she asks in an attempt to switch topics. "What's its title?"

Rachel looks around and notes the couple who must be the painting's subjects. The woman is kneeling on light green stairs with her knees pressed into an oversized square pillow to protect her shins from the steps' sharp angles. She's wearing a bejeweled white dress with a monarch's red cloak over her shoulders, the corners of which are being held by two ladies-in-waiting behind her. The underside of the cloak is white fur with intermittent black spots. There's a silver tiara in her short black hair with more glittering jewels perched on the crown of her head.

The woman bows gracefully, her hands positioned in front of her chest with palms pressed together. Her eyes are closed, and her expression is serene.

Standing above her, a man holds out a golden crown with a multitude of bright gems. He's poised to place it on the woman's head behind her tiara. The man is decked in finery like the woman, but he wears clothes from another era. Instead of the fanciful suits and coats in the typical style of the European monarchy, he's wearing rich red and white embroidered fabrics draped like a Roman toga. In his dark hair, he has a golden laurel circling his head from the nape of his neck to high above his hairline.

Rachel wonders at his identity and the woman's, which the title of the painting may hint at.

"Oh, I don't know," Samil says.

"You don't know?"

"Yeah."

"You brought us here."

"That doesn't mean I know the painting's name. I sensed that it existed in the Louvre place you wanted to go to and thought it would be easy—well, somewhat easier—to travel through."

"You're the God of the Arts."

Samil hesitates at that. "Well, yes, but I haven't been among you besides a few day trips over the past few centuries. I'm less familiar with your more current artwork than the ancient pieces I actively helped influence. Whatever this painting is or whenever it's from, I wasn't around for its creation."

"Hmm," Rachel hums in response. She looks again at the painted woman and man for more clues into their identity and notices something new.

She frowns, her brows pulling together as the corners of her mouth drop. Rachel takes a few steps toward what would be the back of the painting and sees several layers of in-progress images formed of pencil lines and splashes of paint behind the completed piece. There's a broad white space behind the painting that's crisscrossed with pencil lines like a spiderweb.

After a few more moments of studying what lies behind the painting, Rachel recognizes it as the several drafts and stages of bringing the painting together to form the finished scene. The further back she looks, the more blank the space appears. She can see the relative emptiness of the first draft to a cluttered middle ground with various revisions and additions to the completely filled-in final painting.

In the very far back in what must be the very beginning stages of the work, the penciled figures are far different from the final piece. The woman isn't the one being crowned in the first draft.

Instead, the man is depicted with the golden laurel crown lowered onto his head. And rather than someone else crowning him, he's crowning himself. Behind him in the draft sketch, a man dressed as a religious leader, someone who historically served as an emissary from the gods, looks sternly on.

Napoleon, Rachel thinks, remembering from the sparse history she retained about the former French emperor that he famously crowned himself at his coronation, usurping the man standing in for the gods.

"That's neat," Rachel says as her eyes follow the many pencil lines and initial paint smudges back to the finished foreground of the piece of art.

"Yes, it is," Samil agrees as his gaze follows hers. "I have always found it fascinating how your artists keep working at their art, even after they believe they have set down the pencil or paintbrush for the final time. When they keep returning to a work, it grows and changes with its creator throughout their life."

Rachel's eyebrows arch. "That's a nice thought. But these revisions are probably due to propaganda."

"Propaganda?"

"It looks like the artist began by showing the truth. The man, Napoleon, crowned himself at his coronation, which was controversial at the time. That's probably why the artist must have been ordered to show a different scene."

"Huh," Samil says. He reexamines the scene before him from its accurate first iteration to the altered finished piece. "Then I suppose this painting is truly a reflection of the time it was made in. If it had been created any other time, we would be enjoying a different work of art."

"A more truthful one, perhaps."

Samil shrugs. "Isn't there some new truth in the very fact of its manipulation? Doesn't that convey something far more telling of its time than an uncensored scene could?"

Rachel looks at him sideways, not convinced. "I suppose."

"Either way, I like this painting. I wish I could have known its creator."

Rachel doesn't respond, so they stand amidst the art and history silently for a few moments until the agent invokes reality once again.

"Well. People are dying. Shouldn't we get out of here?"

"Right!" Samil says. "The exit is that way."

He points, although he doesn't need to. A bright white window in the shape of a huge rectangle occupies what would be the foreground of the painting and stretches from the floor of the painted hall almost to its ceiling. It's situated where someone looking through it wouldn't be able to see the pencil lines and paint splatters of the previous drafts behind the finished image. And beyond what a viewer could see through this window, the painting fades into a white canvas.

Rachel can't see through the window's blinding whiteness. From its shape and location, she assumes the window is the frame of the painting and that walking through it would take her into an exhibit hall of the Louvre.

She takes a few tentative steps toward it, squinting at the opaque shape. She feels nervous at the thought of stepping through the barrier and into an unseen room.

Samil appears at her elbow and offers her his arm. She glances at him and then at the window, remembering what happened the last time she trusted him to take her somewhere new. Her arm slides around his upper arm with some hesitation.

The two walk into the whiteness.