"Gah!" A girl yells in frustration, throwing down her paintbrush. "I've spent three hours on this claw! Why can't I get it right!" She slams her fists angrily on her stool, her hands turning a bright red. The slam pained her, but the pain was masked by her frustration towards the painting.

"Aurora?" Her grandmother asks as she walks into the small garage where the girl is painting, "are you all right?"

Aurora huffs and folds her arms, "I can't get the claw right! I've done everything, but nothing looks right!"

The grandmother slowly sits on a stool that stands next to the painting, "just calm down and move the brush slowly and smoothly. Imagine the brush as a quiet brook that slowly and smoothly cuts through a forest, right now your brushwork seems more like a raging river instead."

The girl takes a deep breath and looks to her grandmother, "I tried Grandma, believe me. Can't you just help me and do this one part for me?"

The grandmother shakes her head and smiles at her granddaughter, "if you want to learn, I can't help you like that. You have to learn on your own," the grandmother stands, moving towards the door. "Keep working calmly and it will work out, I promise."

"Yeah right," Aurora spits as the grandmother walks out of the garage, the door shutting softly.

"I need something different if I want to make this claw right," the girl says, talking to herself. She often did this as a way to calm herself down and reach decisions and solve problems. "Maybe there will be something in Grandma's old stuff!"

Aurora runs towards the back of the garage where the grandmother's old painting supplies are. The grandmother was a painter in the past, and a famous one at that. She had won many awards and prizes in the days of her youth, but now her hands are too shaky and her vision too blurry to paint as she had when she was young. Aurora wishes to be like her grandmother, so she paints and draws just as her grandmother once had, hoping to gain approval.

As Aurora shuffles through the boxes and bins stacked high in the back of the garage one box falls, its contents spilling over the floor. Aurora pauses and stares at the box and its spilled contents for a second before she moves to pick them up, noticing the barely used brushes and unused paint jars. The paint jars were odd, they were small glass jars instead of paint tubes or a palette.

Aurora gently puts down the box that she had just taken from the top of a stack, not taking her gaze from the paints and brushes. She moves swiftly and quickly to the strange paints, picking up a jar of red paint and examining it. To Aurora's surprise, there seem to be no cracks in any of the glass bottles, all of them perfectly intact. In the box, she can see more paint jars in a myriad of colors and shades.

She puts the spilled content back into the box and looks between the painting and the wall of boxes. "Well, there's no hurt in trying them..." Aurora shrugs, bringing them over to the easel. She immediately takes out a dark grey color, turning the jar over in her hands. She begins to try to turn the top off, but it proves to be difficult. After a few seconds, though, the top pops off, making her almost drop the jar.

Aurora takes a paintbrush and begins to mix the paint in the jar, but surprisingly the paint seems to not need mixing, seeming as if it was just used. She shrugs it off and gets a new brush, dipping the tip in and getting some of the paint onto the brush. Aurora takes a deep breath, "like a quiet brook..." and begins to paint.

"Woah..." she breathes as she paints, "this paint is amazing..." The brush glides across the canvas lightly, creating the texture that she wanted for the claw. She quickly finishes the claw but doesn't want to stop using the paint, so she gets out more colors and continues to paint the other parts of the painting.

After only an hour or two, she finishes the painting with the new paint, "man this paint is amazing!" she says out loud to herself, "but it's probably handmade and expensive... I shouldn't use it too much..."

The girl sighs and refastens all the lids back onto their respective jars. She takes the brushes and washes them with careful hands, rubbing them delicately to get the paint out. She places all of the new paints and paint brushes back into their box and pushes the box to behind the easel, hiding it from sight.

"Well all that's left to do now is to let it dry," she says happily as she switches off the light and slips out of the door quickly and quietly.

The Next Day

Aurora had school, so she left the painting alone until the middle of the afternoon when she got home from school. She immediately ran to the garage, checking on the painting she had done the day before. She pushed the door open quickly, slamming it into the wall behind it and flipped the light switch on, but was greeted by a heinous sight.

Her painting was face down on the floor and things around the room were on the floor instead of in their rightful places. It looked as if a burglar had come, but nothing seemed to be missing. As Aurora took another step into the room she heard a rustling sound, making her stop dead in her tracks. "Hello...?" She asked hesitantly, "anybody here?"

Squawk

"A bird?" She whispers to herself, looking around for it. "How did it get in here?" Her garage had no openings in the roof and the door has been locked all day, meaning that there was no possible way a bird could get in, especially a bird of the size it had to be to cause this mess.

She clicked her tongue, "here little birdy, come on, the doors open." She moved to the side of the room and continued to look around for the bird, afraid that it would attack her. She clicked her tongue again as she moved her eyes around the room quickly, looking for any sign of movement.

As she was about to click her tongue again, she saw movement from the corner of the room by the wall of stacked boxes. Some of the boxes had been knocked over, one of them being the cause of the movement she had seen. She stayed frozen in fear for a few seconds until a box flipped to its side, revealing a small red and orange bird.

"Hey..." Aurora giggled, "it's just like the one in my..." her eyes widened and she launched herself toward her painting, flipping it over frantically. Where a phoenix had once been in her painting was now a blank space. "What the hell..." She gasped as she looked from the painting to the bird.

"How— what— when—" She gasped, beginning to breathe heavily. The bird suddenly flapping its wings, scaring Aurora and making her scream and drop the painting.

Squawk

"Hey!" she yells at the bird, closing the door to the garage quickly, "if you make too much noise you'll—"

"Aurora?" the grandma yells from outside the garage.

"Oh god... too late now..." Aurora sighs, "I'm fine!"

"Are you sure? I heard you scream!"

"I just... saw a bug is all, nothing to worry about!" she yells back as she closes the door more, "you need to be quiet!".

"How's the painting going?" the grandma asks, pushing open the door and quickly shuffling in. "Oh my... I see you've found them..." she sighs, turning to her granddaughter.

"Found what?"

"Well..."

"Are you talking about those paints ?!" Aurora yells, running to the box of paints and pulling them out.

"Well, they're special paints that bring life to your paintings once they dry... I thought you'd never use them since the box has a Do Not Touch warning on the side..."

"No it—," she lifts the box and looks at the side, seeing in big red letters Do Not Touch, "oh..."

"Do you want to hear the story behind these paints?" the grandmother asks as she goes to the small fridge in the corner and takes out a plastic water bottle, "it's about time I told you I guess...".

"That might be nice," Aurora says sarcastically, folding her arms.

The grandmother opens the water bottle as she walks to the bird, pouring the water over it. The bird then begins to 'melt', almost as if water had been poured on a canvas. "Do you want the whole story or the shortened version of the story?" she says as she crumbles the water bottle, throws it into the trash, and then sits on a stool.

"The whole story please," Aurora asks, sitting on the stool next to her grandmother and glancing over at the 'melting' bird.

"Well," she sighs, "I can't recall every detail, but... It all started when I was in high school and just learning to paint... I had gone to the forest outside of my house to paint. It's where I got inspiration. I was having troubles painting and got frustrated just as you had yesterday, but instead of continuing to work, I went for a walk further into the forest. Most of my friends were afraid of the forest, afraid one of the animals would attack them, so I always went in alone. It was peaceful there, though, and being alone made it the perfect place to clear my head and calm down. This day was different. Instead of being the only one in the forest, I ran into another... creature I guess... he wasn't exactly human... he was... well, an elf."

"An elf? Is this story even real?"

"Well, you saw the bird from your painting come alive, didn't you?"

"Yes... but, that doesn't equate to elves existing!"

The grandma stares into Aurora's eyes with a pleading look, hoping that she'll listen and believe her. "Please... I swear it's the truth..."

Aurora sighs loudly, "fine~ just continue."

"Well, as I was saying, he was an elf. I was walking quietly along a path and when I went around a tree quickly, and we bumped into each other. He asked me, 'what's a mage like you doing here?' in a very surprised voice, and when I heard mage I had the same disbelief as you... but he showed me some of the things he had, and they were otherworldly... He had strange talking plants and he had a bag like Mary Poppins that was neverending. He told me that he called me a mage because he could sense magic in me. And he was right.

"Well, my parents died when I was young, so I was adopted. The truth is, my parents were mages and pretty powerful ones too. I found out that they died protecting humans from a mage who wanted to kill humans. Well, after running into Elas, we became great friends. I would go into the forest once a week and we would meet in that same spot. I liked learning about his world and about magic. It was from him that I found out many fantasy creatures actually exist and hide themselves in the world. Like werewolves, vampires, dragons, fairies, mages and so much more... they're called creatures of the fae and many hide using magic. He also told me that some creatures of fae don't know that they are and are often the outcasts because the magic energy they have repels humans. Elas was a researcher who tried to find new creatures and plants so that his people could someday use them."

"Is this real? This seems too unreal..." Aurora says, as her grandma stops to take a breath.

"It is... I know, I can't exactly prove it, but.... please just trust me..." the girl stays silent and bites her lip, looking to where the bird had been moments ago. "Well, anyway, one day I had asked him about magic since he had called me a mage the first day we had met. He told me he only knew one kind of magic from some old papers he had found one day. And that was how to make enchanted paint. Neither of us at the time knew what the paint actually did, but we made it anyway. It was actually quite difficult to make all of the paints, especially since in order for the magic to work we had to make it completely of things from nature. The things we needed also included magical items, which Elas had to get for me.

"It took us about a month and a half to create two paint jars, and when I used it to paint I was so excited. But, I was also disappointed at first that nothing happened. The next day, when I checked the painting, the main focus of my painting was missing and I had found it on the floor in front of it. I had painted a skull since the two colors I had were black and white, and when I saw it, I was happy because I had technically done magic.

"Elas and I then kept making the paints, excited that it worked. This time around was easier to make them since we had done it before, so we created many different colors, all of the colors you see in that box, actually. After that, I found out that the jars refill themselves, pouring water on the object makes it disappear from the real world and back onto the canvas and that only people with magical energy can make the painting come to life."

Aurora picks up her canvas and sees the Phoenix back on her canvas again, making her eyes widen. "Does that mean... I'm a so-called 'mage' too?" the grandma answers with a nod and a smile.

"I don't know any magic besides this. And Elas always found the magical items for me, so I don't know where to find things like that... well, to finish my story, one day Elas stopped coming to our meeting spot, and I still don't know what happened to him. Well, that's really the whole story behind those paints. I never really used them after Elas disappeared, though, but I could never bring myself to throw them away either."