Arc III (1) - 1720
Elizabeth sighs loudly and rubs the palm of her hands against her face. She waits for a few seconds before grasping her brush again. She sits straighter on her wooden bench and analyzes her painting once more. She draws calculated lines here and then. She lets brush move freely. She resorts to blurring the shadows a bit more.
The painting is still pure trash.
Elizabeth mumbles some insults, feeling absolutely defeated. She looks at the piece- the monstrosity she just made for a few extra seconds before throwing it on top of her failure pile dismissively.
She's ruined. She's absolutely ruined and she will have to move from her already tiny, messy house to a tinier, probably messier one.
Well, she's not ruined just yet. She still has left a portion of the money she won thanks to her last decent painting -almost one year ago. But it's scarce, very, very scarce. So much so, that she has tried to reduce costs by replacing poor-quality fish for plain white rice, just to buy a few cans of paints that she keeps wasting on unsellable art.
Elizabeth knows that money comes and goes. She is definitely worried about the way it is currently only going, for sure, but she's more concerned about something else that has also been lacking.
Her talent. As plain as that. Her works have been bad because she has been bad, her traces have been shaky, her way of mixing colors has been unpleasant. Every single decision she has made on her latest paintings has been wrong, imprecise, ruining.
She remembers with melancholy the times when she didn't seem able to stop painting. Autumn trees, bluish skies, smiling children, the summit of a mountain she has only seen in her imagination, everything seemed to be source of inspiration for young, innocent Elizabeth, who conceived the world as an adventure and a canvas as the only way of expressing the delight to discover it.
Twenty-two-years-old Elizabeth has already seen the world, or at least a considerable part of it. The tenderness, the corruption, the rain, the sunlight. She has walked along the streets of the busy city. She has taken a few months to explore the mystery of nature. She has done everything possible worth of inspiration and yet...
She stares at her pile of unusable works.
She still has nothing to offer back.
Eliza sighs. She tries ties her long, brunette hair in a bun, trying to prevent her mind from returning to the one thought that's been keeping her awake for months.
The only specific thing she remembers about her grandmother, sweet, and gentle whenever her flowers stayed intact, is what she used to murmur into her ear like a secret.
One day, you will depict the beauty of love.
Elizabeth huffs under her breath. She knows what love offered to her parents: multiple headaches, a permanent sense of bitterness, and an unwanted child. She is not even sure if she's ever met an honestly happy couple. Or at least a self-aware, honestly happy couple.
She doesn't need love. She really doesn't. She's just fine with her sketches, and her paints, and her occasional shot of soju-
Suddenly, a loud knocking on her door snaps her out of her thoughts. She feels equal parts relieved and annoyed.
She looks at the clock. 5 pm. Way past her working time. However, the few coins in her pocket whisper the sad truth: you don't get to be picky.
She opens the door, then, slowly, only to find a man staring at her with plain impatience tinting his features. She raises her eyebrow, ready to greet him, but he rushes past her making his way inside of the house.
