Warning: This story contains graphic descriptions of violence, body horror, mutilation, and psychological distress, explicit imagery, mention of death, fire, use of dead body parts to make things, gore. Reader discretion is strongly advised. If you are sensitive to gore, death, or disturbing imagery, please proceed with caution or avoid this content altogether.
Authors note: Don't hate me for this it just came to my mind and it turned out a rather beautiful story. --------------------------------------------------------
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The room always smelled like turpentine.
Not the sharp kind....not fresh... but old, sticky, baked into the floorboards. The walls were yellowed with it. The windows had long stopped opening, sealed shut with salt-white dust and forgotten seasons.
Lucian sat in the center of the room, hunched before a canvas.
He did not move.
The light from the tall oil lamp behind him flickered .... not from wind, for there was none.... but from something colder, more interior. The flame wavered as though it, too, had begun to tremble at the things painted in this room.
There were many canvases. Dozens. All of them leaned face-first against the walls as if in shame, their backs warped with time and dampness. If you pulled one out.... carefully.... you might see something that once resembled a face. But none remained intact. The paint had bubbled, or melted, or split, as if the subject had clawed its way out from inside.
Lucian did not remember painting most of them.
But he knew who they were all supposed to be.
Her.
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He hadn’t been mad when he met her.
Y/N.
She was nothing extraordinary by any standard. She had a way of speaking softly, with care, as though everything she said might be the last thing you’d hear before dying..... She touched things as if they bruised easily. Flowers. Paintings. His heart.
He had found her in a gallery, oddly...... not in front of his work, but in front of someone else's, frowning. She wasn’t impressed. She didn’t pretend.
