The wobbily vinyl of an antique gramophone subtly cracked, simmering as a lone cymbal shimmered in. Incoming spiraling saxophone runs leaned from smoky subtones into shrieking altissimo as a vampiress with skin as rich as espresso, eyes closed, rhythmically jerked her head left to right. She swept her silk-pressed, glossy, back-length obsidian hair, with bleach-white tips all around. 

A lover of free-form jazz, there were few things Elara truly loved. She was cut from a cloth of Vicuña wool, dipped and dripping with the most odious black ink masquerading as perfume. The firstborn of House Veylthorne was a true example of beauty only being skin deep. 

She undoubtedly was up to no good…

Settling into the zone for her studio session, in front was a blank canvas resting on an antique mahogany lyre and brass easel. In her pirouette across the room, she clapped her ring-bedazzled hands above her head before grabbing an elegant paintbrush carved from black petrified wood nearly the length of a longsword. It was a weapon disguised as an artist’s instrument. Known as [i]The Last Stroke of Saint Orphielle[/i], its bristles were impossibly white except for its curled tip dipped in blood. 

No palette was in sight. Her available swatch was supplied entirely by a silver urn filled to the brim with not just any blood but Type Rh-null, virgin blood. Whose in particular? And how she acquired such? No telling, but the moment since the Katurans landed on Orst, she had been at work in her castle, if you would even consider the odd structure as one.

Elara's primary residence wasn't as much a castle as it was a leaning crystal-mirror spike, embedded deep into the land strangled by overgrowth of thick, oxblood thorny vines turned spires. The majestic tangle of stalks, hard like enchanted metal, deeply rooted in the ground, kept the unsteady secure. Twisting upward, they penetrated the structure at multiple points, forming dozens of pathways and corridors carved into their hollowed frames. 

In the very top spire, Elara painted away, her Apollo and Artemis earrings twinkling with every delicate stroke as scarlet energy funneled through her hands, twirling around the brush with a nebulous glimmer. Her burgundy eyes remained closed; she was not painting with sight, but with spirit.

In this studio session, galleries’ worth of scenes were rendered, varnished with magic. Upon the completion of each piece, Elara’s slim, sleek figure, draped in a red silk tea gown with bold patterns, retrofitted with a rhinestone-trimmed bustled corset, sashayed gracefully toward the next canvas. She was in a trance…

For just a moment, the inks of the universe became clear to her. Each mural in oneiric gothic surrealism…

“A pair embarks…”

[i]“And The World Remembered What It Buried…”[/i]

[i]“And Survival Precursored Hunger…”[/i]

[i]“And Dark Knew Her Name Before She Spoke It…”[/i]

[i]“And Then the Stars Forgot to Witness Us…”[/i]

[i]“And The Sky Began Sending Itself As Fragments…”[/i]

[i]“And The Island That Began To Remember It Was Moving…”[/i]

[i]“Hath The World Spoke Through Its Wounds…”[/i]

Elara’s smoky lids parted over her fox-like eyes, initially showing little emotion before the weight of bureaucratic irritation settled in. 

[color=9e005d][i]“How fascinating. Everything important arrives at once or not at all…”[/i][/color]