Aiyano listlessly wandered back and forth among the artists and those similarly aimlessly strolling, glancing at the various artworks displayed on all sides, both impressive and less so. With a sigh, she sat down at a random table and rested her head in her hand, gazing out the window – but there was nothing to see, as it overlooked a crumbling stone fence surrounding the art studio.
Despite the fact that today was a crucial day for the empire, the festival offered an incredible amount of entertainment, and everyone she met greeted her with a friendly smile. Yet, at that moment, an unwelcome sense of gloom washed over her soul and aura.
What was she doing here? How did she get involved in all of this? How many innocent people had already suffered, and how many more would suffer – and for what? What did the near and distant future hold? How many more enemies lurked in every shadow? Questions arose one after another, but they didn't give way to each other; instead, they accumulated and piled up into a heavy, exhausting mass.
Dropping her face into her hands, she experienced a degree of sensory deprivation – but only visually, as her hearing continued to be assaulted by the sounds of other people's conversations, laughter, coughing, the shuffling of shoes, the scratching of pencils and charcoal, the slurping sounds of paint, the thumping in the hallway, and so on, and so forth.
With a heavy sigh, she lifted her hands from her face and blinked for a few seconds. She must have simply been sleep-deprived – which was not surprising, as she had woken up on a train this morning, much earlier than usual.
Scanning the table with her eyes, she reached for the nearest clean sheet of paper and pulled it closer. After a brief pause, she picked up the first pencil she found and, with another sigh, without removing her left hand from under her head, began to listlessly scribble some meaningless lines.
Soon, these lines coalesced into vague geometric shapes – a triangle, an oval, a square. There was no system or intention behind them. Then she added a few squiggles, as if a child were drawing a cloud, and shaded in a random area, simply because she felt like expressing her current mood on the paper. At one point, something completely vague seemed to resemble a bush. With a great effort, she reached for the far end of the table for a green pencil – which was somewhat difficult to do with her head propped up, but she didn't want to lift it even more.
At some point, all this haphazard scribbling began to take shape into something slightly more coherent – she had no desire for this, she was perfectly happy with the chaos and would have liked to continue doodling and scribbling something undefined, but, unfortunately, the nature of this elderly woman turned out to be more predisposed to conscious images than to abstractions. From a certain moment, even this kind of drawing transitioned from a meditative, stress-relieving process into something more tense, requiring an orderly depiction on paper.
With another sigh, and again gazing at the cracked stone wall outside the window, the seventy-year-old virgin reluctantly straightened up, gathered all the pencils together, and began a more conscious process – discarding from her mind ravens, bears, alien dogs, rabbits, cats, musicians, and artists, baked goods, fairies, and monks, imperial dynasties, guards, and the church, baboons, beliefs, astrology, curses, thousand-year-old stories, spells, super-duper items, characteristics, and experience points, conditional units of weight...
A peaceful place
Having finished the scribbling, she wiped her hands, smeared with various colored leads, with a napkin and sighed, for what felt like the umpteenth time.
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