The sunrays seeped in through the blanket of blue water, illuminating the floating form of a fallen God.

~○~

The Painter’s apprentice watched in silence as the man swept a thumb over his cheek, leaving a trail of dark red over the dusky skin. For a moment, he considered pointing it out, but decided against just as quickly. It would be pointless, seeing as his face had now become nothing short of the canvas he held in his nimble fingers—streaked with various hues of expensive paint.

His eyebrows gently creased in concentration, the Painter ran a brush gracefully up and down the canvas in front of him, his clothes seemingly an art work of themselves with the number of colours haphazardly splattered over them.

Said man let out a contented sigh, his broad shoulders straining as he leaned back to admire his handiwork.

A blissful, dreamy smile bloomed over his lips as his gaze ran over the cerulean-and-white sea waves, intricately painted schools of fish, and most importantly, the main attraction of the piece—a handsome merman floating halfway above the depths of the ocean, his skin a smooth bronze and eyes a light brown, almost golden in the sunrays. A thick mop of hair swayed over his face as the sea-creature stared into the metaphorical distance, in the direction of a ship retreating into the sunset.

He had one arm stretched out, an expression of confusion and curiosity marring his delicate features as he gripped a glistening sunstone. The gem, presumably thrown into the ocean by someone from the ship, glittered in his pale palm.

“Isn’t it beautiful?”, the Painter asked, adoration for his own art seeping through his tone. “Tell me, isn’t the whole idea absolutely breath taking? That an entire world exists under the curtain of those dancing waves, teeming with all sorts of mysteries and magic and what not!”

“Of course, absolutely breath taking”, the apprentice echoed, wiping his own colour-stained palms on a dirty rag of a cloth. He knew very well where this conversation was heading.

“And the painting, don’t you think it’s come out splendidly?”

“Of course, I do”, he replied, unable to hide the hint of fondness from his own voice. “In fact, I’d find it much more so if I actually understood what it’s about.”

The Painter beckoned him closer, switching over his brush to its rear as he pointed the figure painted near the end of the canvas. “See that?”, he prompted. “That’s the Ship, the first sign of otherworldly life for our hero, the Merman. Aboard that ship is a Man, a person, a human who’s dropped his precious gemstone into the lap of the vast, endless ocean.”

The apprentice nodded thoughtfully, his eyebrows scrunching up as his mentor spoke.

“That’s when the centre of this piece, the Merman, whose eyes has never once laid their gaze on anything above the realms of the vast blue ocean, learns for the first time that there are living, breathing creatures like him in the world beyond. To him, the realms above his own are the heavens, where the gods that govern his people are said to dwell.”

“So he finds the gemstone that’s dropped into the ocean by what, he thinks, is a heavenly being, and learns of human civilization for the first time?”

“Precisely.”

“And what happens after that?”, the apprentice probed. “Do the Man and Merman ever meet? Does he get to return the gem? Why exactly was the gem flung into the oceans in the first place?”

“The answers to that —”, the Painter simply chuckled in response, grabbing a pair of old-fashioned horn-rimmed glasses from a side table and propping them up crookedly over his nose. “—will perhaps lie in another painting, formed by another thought, on another midnight just like this one.”

The apprentice’s lips stretched into a smile at the oblivious man who’d gone back to humming a cheerful tune as his eyes raked over his precious creation, adding a little touch of white here, a hint of blue there.

The artist often had his head buried in the deepest trenches of the ocean rather than the clouds, mostly found curled up in solitude with thick novels of seas and ships and adventures of all sorts as he softly proclaimed his desires to do the same. He had little to no one for company as he painted his nights away, nothing but the stars, silence and occasionally the apprentice himself.

His paintings sold like precious gems, yet, not one person seemed to have a kind word to tell their creator, or an ear to lend while he spoke about his dreams, hopes and deepest desires. The Painter seemed to have an innocence far too precious for the world, his life filled with pretty thoughts, pretty paintings and pretty fortunes.

The junior thought he’d learnt more about the artist than the art itself over the months he’d spent watching as masterpiece upon masterpiece was painstakingly constructed in the brightly lit studio.

“All we need now is a name for this beauty”, the Painter uttered in a satisfied voice, tinted with a pride found nestled only in the deepest corners of an artist’s heart, worth every single drop of an ocean’s expanse in gold and more.

“Don’t forget about getting yourself a good chunk off the bank balance of whoever is lucky enough to own this”, he reminded, only half in jest.

The Painter waved a dismissive arm at the sentence, shooting him a warm smile. “Of what use is money to me? Can it whisk me away to the lands of my dreams? Take me to underwater kingdoms? Leave that, no wad of notes, thick as it is, can hold my hand and steer me as a friend would.”
“But that very wad of money keeps me around, remember?”

The Painter let out a dramatically pained gasp. “And here I was, thinking you were here to learn my art from me.”

“Hm, I wonder what gave you that impression.” The apprentice rubbed his own eyes wearily, breathless from the coastal breeze of Kanyakumari slapping him on the face all day.

He’d been reckless enough shifting to the seaside town to study the art of painting, surely his parents had already cut him off from the will for giving up his life to play with some crayons, as they’d called it.

Quitting his apprenticeship now would confine him to his delivery-boy life permanently.
For now, and for quite a while in the near future, he had no choice but to put up with the eccentricities of his otherwise brilliant mentor.

“I am most certainly here for my remuneration, so unless you come home with a fat cheque from the auction next week, you better get hold of that pricey little sunstone from your painting to pay me”, he remarked as the Painter chuckled, adding that he’d bring the merman along too for good measure.

As he walked out after bidding a goodnight to the man not much older than himself, he couldn’t help but shake his head at the sheer absurdity of the man.

He wondered how such a person still in the prime of his youth could crawl into the recluses of a small, quaint home in the sleepy outskirts of a seaside town, his head filled with nothing but the thoughts of mermaids and magic and mystical meetings.

He peeked out of the window on his way out, only to find the Painter collapsed over the rickety sofa that stood in a corner of his home-turned-studio.

The apprentice saw the man mumbling under his breath even in the clutches of sleep, perhaps dreaming about dozing turtles, colourful corals, even an arm of friendship from someone below the waves lapping at their feet.

But what he didn’t see was the painting start to glow an ethereal silver in the darkness, the light spilling out from the portrait and crawling around to the slumbering Painter to engulf him in their embrace.

~o~

Author's  note :

A slightly bigger excerpt, for this story is pretty huge !

To read the entire work, please do get a copy of "Mystics and Muses" from Amazon!

I'd love to hear your comments, please let me know what you think :-)