She had once believed color could save her.
A smear of light across canvas, a whisper of lavender at dusk, the hush of gold between shadows—each stroke had once been a breath she didn't know she was holding. Painting was how she made sense of the world, how she mapped the ache inside her chest when words failed. Her first brush was a gift from her mother. Her first finished canvas, a promise to herself: I will make beauty from everything that hurts,
But beauty didn't pay rent.
It didn't stop the gallery doors from closing, or the emails from staying unanswered, or the friends from slowly fading into silence. It didn't cure exhaustion.
Now, even her colors bled grey.
Soleil sat curled on the edge of her threadbare studio couch, knees drawn to her chest, her face lit only by the dull glow of her desk lamp. Outside, rain painted streaks on the windows like long-forgotten brushstrokes. Thunder growled softly, as if the sky were gritting its teeth.
The walls were crowded with forgotten dreams—canvases leaning against each other like ghosts in a gallery of regrets. Some unfinished. Others too painful to complete. They whispered as she passed them, their silence heavier than noise, She hadn't painted in months.
She'd thought she could give it up. Walk away from the hunger, the obsession, the emptiness that came when a painting refused to be born. She got a retail job. Paid her bills. Smiled politely at strangers. But her hands ached. Every day they begged for the brush again, and every night she ignored them, Until tonight, There was one canvas left. One she couldn't throw away. One she couldn't finish.
It stood alone on her easel, untouched for weeks, half-swallowed in shadows. Something about it frightened her—not the image itself, but the feeling it gave her. Like it had always been waiting for her to return.
She rose slowly and walked to it, bare feet sticking to the cold wooden floor.
The painting was strange. A faceless figure cloaked in white stood beneath a shattered sky, one hand outstretched, the other gripping what looked like a brush—no, a staff? A relic? Behind them, clouds swirled like oil in water, and something ancient stirred in the gold-streaked void. It looked… divine. Or broken. Or both.
She couldn't remember painting it, And yet her fingers twitched with the memory of it.
The brush sat beside her paints, forgotten but not abandoned. She picked it up. The bristles were stiff, the wood worn smooth by years of use. She dipped it into a violet hue—her favorite, always saved for last. A color she'd once called soulshade.
This would be the last stroke she ever made,
Her voice was a whisper. It didn't echo in the room, but something—something—heard it.
"Let me finish this. Just once. Just this. Then I'm done."
The brush touched the canvas.
And the world stopped breathing.
At first it was subtle. The paint shimmered, shifted. The figure's faceless head turned—ever so slightly—toward her. The fractured sky behind them rippled outward like a stone thrown into a pool of light, Then the air bent. Colors peeled from the painting and spiraled around her, tendrils of gold and violet brushing her skin like fireflies made of thought. Her feet left the ground.
Something cracked. Not aloud—but inside her. A seam in her soul. A tether snapping, She tried to scream, but the sound curled backward into her throat. The world folded in on itself, canvas swallowing air, light, memory and her.
Color poured into her lungs. She wasn't falling, not exactly—she was being rewritten. Every part of her smeared like pigment across the sky. Her hands dissolved into brushstrokes. Her heartbeat pulsed like a drum made of thunder and time. She could see nothing. And everything.
She was being painted.
Darkness
Silence
And then…..
Breath.
She gasped like someone pulled from drowning. Cold air rushed into unfamiliar lungs.
Her body—too light, too fragile—arched on a floor of smooth white marble. Her vision spun, settling on towering arches and a ceiling inlaid with murals that shifted like living dreams. Pale fire flickered from silver sconces carved in the shape of wings and flames. A sacred chamber. Ruined.
The scent of incense, ash, and paint filled the air.
Her hands—these hands weren't hers. They were too smooth, too graceful, almost otherworldly. She pushed herself upright, and strands of silken black hair fell into her face.
Somewhere distant, bells tolled.
A dozen figures stood at the chamber's edges, clad in long robes, their hoods drawn. She couldn't read their expressions, but their voices rose like a prayer already fading.
"She's fallen," one whispered. "The Artisan is broken."
"No soul-thread answers," said another. "She is… empty."
Artisan?
Soleil's throat closed around the wrong name. Her mouth opened but the words tasted foreign. She tried to speak, to ask where she was—but all that escaped was a dry, hoarse whisper: "Who…?"
They didn't answer. A priest stepped forward and touched her forehead with a glowing crystal. It flared, then dimmed.
"No divinity stirs," he said, voice grim. "This is not Azeriah."
That name echoed through her like a memory half-formed.
They tore the brush from her hands. Not the one from her world—a different one. Elegant, impossibly fine, its shaft inscribed with gold script and threads of star-metal. Her grip tightened, instinct screaming mine, but they pulled it away and locked it in a crystal case that sealed with a burst of cold air.
"You are not the Artisan," someone hissed.
"So what are you?"
She had no answer.
They dragged her to her feet. Her legs trembled. Through the haze, she caught sight of the ruined relic painting behind her. Divine sigils flickered and died along its edge, curling in on themselves like burned parchment.
The prophecy had failed.
Because of her.
As she stumbled past the altar, something caught her gaze—an immense tapestry woven in fire-thread, hanging above the chamber like a silent witness.
It showed a masked emperor wreathed in hollow flame, seated on a throne of ruin. In his hand: fire incarnate. And beside him, a woman wielding a radiant brush, her face torn violently from the fabric—erased by time or intent.
Soleil's gaze locked on that empty space.
For a breath, the world held still.
The torn threads flickered—and shifted.
And for the briefest heartbeat, she saw her own face staring back.