《The Painter: A fantasy psych thriller and epic》5. Umlom

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The painter made one last, long brush stroke on the canvas to smooth the pond’s reflection of the tumultuous sky above, though he found no joy in its completion. For nearly five years, creating this familiar picture had become a torturous routine. Looking at it no longer elicited any of the conflicting emotions from when he’d first painted it. He knew what direction the clouds were going.

He could more or less paint it with his eyes closed. Despite the bathetic completion of the work, the painter still moved with care as he lifted it. His walls were now crowded with replicas of the pond, the clouds, and the previously uncertain storm. The only abstention was his signature. Otherwise, each was a near perfect facsimile of the one before it. Each ready to receive the sun Thesdon had so innocently added to the original.

“Another masterpiece,” he said to himself as a matter of fact. He had indeed run out of room on the walls and leaned the canvas up against a cabinet. The only piece of wall not covered by a replica was the giant splatter of golden-yellow paint. The canvas-covered walls had come to feel like a prison cell, and the yellow paint was evidence of his transgression.

With the day’s masterpiece dried and his brushes and paints ready for the next painting, he set about his puttering for the day. His wife’s words still rang in his ears. He’s gone... He knew she was probably right, but he was unable to move on. The odds his son was alive somewhere were unlikely, but he’d spend the rest of the day poring over different routes in his notebook.

The painter had long since stopped his daily treks into the woods near his house; every square inch of forest had been covered many times over. His search radius had expanded further across Umlom, where he’d first discovered the phenomenon of his perplexing headaches.

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Uncertain of their cause, he attempted different routes, trying to find one where he didn’t feel like he was being pushed back or pulled home. He wasn’t sure which it was, a push or a pull, only that he hadn’t found a way to extend the search for his son into other realms. Even parts of Umlom were unavailable to him. Despite the helpless trials, the man still held out hope.

It was shortly after Kahriah left that he first discovered his tether. He’d heard a mage was in Susnakuni in the neighbouring realm of TidTid. It was a rare occurrence and an opportunity to discuss his masterpiece condition with someone who might understand. Mages didn’t take appointments, but the painter would think of a way to be seen on the road. He readied Tolo and pushed her as fast as he could, for once, putting her to the test. She held strong for several hours, but it was her rider who ultimately failed.

West of Inrunson, about an hour outside of town, his head was consumed by throbbing pain as if someone was scraping the inside of his skull. He pulled the reins, doing everything he could to stay on his horse. Tolo responded quickly to the command and pivoted before trotting back in the direction from which they had come. With each retraced step by Tolo, the pain subsided in the painter. Bewildered, he turned Tolo around again and started back toward Susnakuni. Within strides of where it had started before, the agony resumed.

On his next attempt, he lashed himself to Tolo, took her back about fifty yards from the boundary of pain, and brought her to a hard gallop. He lowered his head to her neck, closed his eyes, and braced.

He awoke sometime later, still strapped to Tolo, who was dutifully transporting him back towards Kinney.

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After that, he repeated the experiment in every direction with the same results. On several occasions he’d even hired skiffs, but the sea offered no exit from his confines either. Neither the terrain, time of day, mode of transport, nor the weather made any difference. For over four years, the painter’s systematic experiments yielded nothing except the circular shape of his prison. Despite the wide variety of routes, he always stopped in the same five towns and returned home with the same painting materials. He tried to fight the urge to paint, but he couldn’t help himself. It was either an act of self-atonement or a feeble call to his son to finish it.

It typically took him about a month to use up his supplies, which served as his calendar, marking the time for travel.

The closer he got to travelling, the further he pushed the words of his wife from his mind. They interfered with his futile optimism and pragmatic cartography. In the moments leading up to a trip, he believed he might learn something. A note. A conversation. An odd look from a stranger. An opening in his boundary. A change in the nature of the headaches. Anything.

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